One SEO professional asked John Mueller during a hangout about page speed.
Their main question was: does page speed even matter for SEO? They said they read in a document back in 2010 from Google’s website that page speed is an important metric when it comes to SEO.
Does this still hold true in 2022 as well?
John answered that page speed definitely still matters in 2022. But, the tricky part about this is that page speed itself as a metric no longer exists.
Instead, Google uses Core Web Vitals, which include different elements about user experience that must be optimized.
And page speed, John explains, is a score from zero to 100 (he isn’t sure whether he is mixing up the tools but he believes that’s the score range)
But Core Web Vitals are something that also take into consideration many types of metrics on the speed of a website.
And Google has Core Web Vitals documented extremely well.
So some amount of speed goes into that too. And Core Web Vitals are definitely a ranking factor.
Google has it for mobile and desktop.
Now, it is based on what users actually see and not a theoretical test of your pages. And, for the most part, Google focuses on the difference between something that is reasonably okay and something that is very slow.
And they have that in the different categories for the individual metrics where they have good, medium, bad…but John forgets what the names are.
Usually when you come out of the bad section into the medium section, that’s where Google would say “Oh, this website is improving and looking better.”
But, what you don’t see is big ranking changes overall for that.
Rather, you would see changes for queries where they have similar content in the search results. So, if someone is searching for your company name, they would not show some random blog just because it’s a little bit faster instead of your homepage.
Even if your homepage is very slow, they would still show your homepage.On the other hand, if someone is searching for “running shoes,” and there are lots of people writing about running shoes, then this is where the speed aspect does play a bit more into it who they show in the SERPs.
The other thing where speed plays into is when it comes to crawling itself, especially for larger websites.
For larger sites, if the web server is very slow, then Google can’t crawl as much.
This happens at approximately the 53:03 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 8 53:03
Thanks, John, for I just wanted to ask in the first place, as I asked you about our page speed. So does it even matter for SEO? So I read in a document back in 2010 from Google’s website that page speed is an important metric when it comes to SEO. Does it hold true in 2022 as well, or maybe it’s not…(inaudible)?
John 53:28
It definitely matters. And so I think one one tricky part is we don’t have this notion of PageSpeed itself. But rather, we kind of use the Core Web Vitals, which include different elements about user experience. And so the page speed score, I think, I think that’s like a score from zero to 100. I’m not sure, maybe I’m mixing up the tools.
Yeah, that’s something that also takes into account a different number of kinds of metrics on the speed of a website. And we don’t use that exactly like that, in the Core Web Vitals. And the Core Web Vitals, we have documented fairly well. So some amount of speed goes into that too. And Core Web Vitals is definitely a ranking factor. We have that for mobile and desktop now. It is based on what users actually see and not kind of a theoretical test of your pages.
And for the most part, we focus on the difference between something that is reasonably okay and something that is very slow. And we have that in the different categories for the individual metrics where I think we have good, medium, bad, I forgot what the names are. And usually kind of when you come out of the bad section into the medium section, that’s, that’s where we would say, Oh, this website is improving and looking better.
What you don’t tend to see is big ranking changes overall for that. But rather, you would see changes for queries where we have similar content in the search results. So if someone is searching for your company name, we would not show some random blog, just because it’s a little bit faster, instead of your homepage.
We would show your homepage, even if it’s very slow. On the other hand, if someone is searching for, I don’t know, running shoes, and there are lots of people writing about running shoes, then that’s where the speed aspect does play a bit more of a role.
The other thing where speed plays in is when it comes to crawling itself, where, especially for large websites, if a web server is very slow, then we can’t crawl as much. And the amount of crawling that we can do is more around, kind of like, how much we can index, it’s not a sign that we would rank that website lower. So for very large websites, speed definitely also plays a role with regards to crawl.
SEO Professional 8 56:12
Okay, so the Core Web Vitals, from what I understand, is a subset of overall page rank, right? So these are like four or five important things that you should definitely focus on, but there are other things.
So now maybe we are at a stage where we are into the green zone of those four or five things. So it should be like “Hey, we are done.” And let’s now just get into over-optimizing that thing. But still, you know, there are certain things like Google is showing, “Hey, this JavaScript is a bit lengthy, or you have unused JavaScript.
And you should also try to optimize. These are the conditions that we are getting it. So otherwise, we are green, and still it should be a good approach to follow these things, or no? Maybe it’s like now we are over-optimizing…
John 56:59
It sounds a little bit like you’re into that zone, where you’re focusing on all of the small details that make tiny tiny tiny differences. Yeah. So that might be what you call over-optimization, that might be kind of in that direction.
I think what I would do, though, is double check to see if there are any kind of user-facing effects that you can still work on. Like if you recognize, Well, Core Web Vitals is green. So for SEO, we’re good.
But you see users jumping from your website because of maybe an interstitial or kind of bad accessibility on a website, then those are still issues that you can look at. But those would not be for SEO, they would just be for your website overall.
