If a website loads poorly, it will lose traffic, and conversions, and will not be ranked highly by search engines.
If the website loads slowly, most people will leave it and never come back.
Page speed is the speed at which an individual page load on your website. Different pages can have different speeds due to factors such as the size of images, scripts or plugins.
What is Site Speed?
Site speed is the speed that your site loads as users navigate through it. Google’s Site Speed report in Analytics shows how quickly users are able to interact and see content on your site. Site speed focuses on the overall website as a whole.
Page speed, on the other hand, focuses on a specific page speed.
Page load speed (and overall website speed) is a crucial component of user experience
When does page speed affect SEO? Google has been shown to reward websites with faster load times with a higher positioning.
Studies have shown that individuals truly care about how fast results show up for them. Due to faster pages being more popular than slower pages, this gives search engines another SEO factor to rank sources off of in SERP.
However, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal. Because of this, slower pages may still rank highly if it has great and relevant content.