Does WordPress Site Speed Really Matter for SEO?

Staying current with some SEO vs. WordPress site speed concerns can be a burden. After all, keeping on top of the various moving parts of a successful site is tricky enough, without worrying about which one of over 200 ranking signals is currently making a difference in the SERPs.
One SEO signal that’s gotten a lot of attention over the last few years is site speed. We all know we should be making our sites faster, but how much difference does it really make in terms of SEO?
In this piece, we’ll round up a number of external studies and look at our own suite of sites to get to the bottom of how much WordPress site speed really moves the needle out in the wild. By the time we’re done, you’ll have a much clearer idea of how much of your efforts you should be devoting to it.

Let’s kick things off with a quick look at the official line on the subject:

The official line on site speed and SEO

Google’s 2010 announcement of site speed as a ranking factor put it on site owners’ radars worldwide, but the actual details revealed were characteristically opaque.
Citing previous internal studies, Google confirmed that site speed would be added into the mix of existing ranking signals, but stopped short of discussing how much weight it would actually carry. A number of points were, however, stressed from the outset:

1. Site relevance would remain more important than site speed for SEO.
2. Fewer than 1% of search queries would be initially affected.
3. The site speed SEO signal would only be initially applied to searches in English on Google.com.

In the years since that initial announcement, the importance of site speed from a user perspective has become crystal clear. Study after study from the likes of Walmart, Akamai, and Amazon have consistently driven home the point that users treasure fast loading and response times. The exact role site speed plays in SERP results, however, has remained somewhat confusing. Witness, for example, the list of massively bloated sites that continue to rank highly across the web.

There’s no doubting Google’s commitment to quickness as an overall goal, however. From Google DNS to Google Fiber, and PageSpeed Tools to the recently announced AMP Project, speed is at the core of many of the search giant’s more high-profile projects. And though they’ve yet to clarify the exact weighting of site speed in search engine results, that hasn’t stopped others from trying to do so.
With that in mind, let’s move on to what third party studies have revealed on the matter: