Page Speed - Don't go crazy tweaking to squeeze out that extra little bit of speed.

[Mike Friedman]

I think most readers here are probably already aware of this. I know I have been saying it for the past few years. This is the closes I have seen to Google confirming it though. Page speed really only matters if your site is excessively slow. 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fast-slow-23927.html

Basically, what Paul Bakaus said is that Google cannot really tell if a page is fast, but they can identify really slow pages. It makes sense. It is easy to see when there are slow loading elements on a page such as over sized images or slow loading scripts. How fast a page loads at your location though is not really an indication of page speed because it is dependent on your connection. It also doesn't take into account things like server load which can be slowing down an otherwise really fast page. 

Short version... Don't go crazy trying to squeeze out those last few fractions of a second on your page load time.

[Wunderkind]

Really all you have to do is look at some of the most popular sites on the internet. Most of them "fail" Google's Pagespeed Insights Tool miserably and still rank fantastically.

All faster pages mean is it costs Google less resources to crawl them. It's all about their bottom line really.

[deezn]

Page speed does help with conversion I hear.

[Guest]

11 hours ago, deezn said:

Page speed does help with conversion I hear.

Of course - in this day and age, there's no reason for a page to load slowly...if it does, the visitor is going to bail on the page rather than wait. 

Google can't really measure page speed easily, mainly because of the sheer number of variables involved. But I would hazard a guess that the only place you're going to typically encounter slow pages are those being served from shared hosting with maxed out resources.

More importantly, as your traffic grows, make sure you're upgrading hosting to accommodate it. It's really not that expensive to set up virtual servers for this, although it does require strong technical skills. 

[Mike Friedman]

16 hours ago, deezn said:

Page speed does help with conversion I hear.

It does to some degree. If your page loads in 1.25 seconds and you speed it up to 1.00 seconds, you are not going to notice a difference in conversions. Where page speed impacts conversions is with very slow loading pages. If it takes 6-7 seconds for a page to load, you could lose some traffic and conversions, especially if the visitors have to go through several pages to convert.

[yukon]

If you can set a sundial to your page speed, you might be a redneck SEO.