Impact on SEO

Why Page Speed Matters for SEO & Google Rankings

Google sees web performance as a major quality characteristic of every website.

Google Uses Crux Data to Measure Page Speed

Google is now using real performance data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) instead of performance measurements by the Googlebot crawler. The CrUX Report is powered by real user measurement of key user experience metrics across the public web, aggregated from users who have opted-in to syncing their browsing history, have not set up a sync passphrase, and have usage statistic reporting enabled.

Google Switched to Mobile-First Indexing

Google launched the new mobile-first index, which means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of the webpage for ranking and indexing purposes. This change makes mobile performance one of the key factors for the Google search ranking.

LCP Is One of the Three Core Web Vitals

In May 2020 the Chrome team announced that Core Web Vitals are becoming ranking signals for search results. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome. The current set focuses on three aspects of the user experience – loading, interactivity, and visual stability – and includes the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) as the metric that measures loading performance.

Page Speed Affects Your Google Ads

Advertising and speed go hand in hand, with faster landing pages delivering better ROI. To help you understand how landing page speed affects your ad performance, Google introduced the mobile speed score. Evaluated on a 10-point scale, 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast, the mobile speed score lets you quickly see which pages are providing a fast mobile experience and which ones may require your attention.

Pinterest Proved SEO Impact of Page Speed

Pinterest engineers ran a quantitative experiment that improved page speed by 60% percent and lead to an 15% increase of organic SEO traffic.

How Speed Kit Affects Your SEO & Google Rankings

Google Crawler Sees No Content From Speed Kit

WRS (Web Rendering Service) loads each URL, following server and client redirects, same as a regular browser. However, WRS does not retain state across page loads. This means that local storage and session storage data as well as HTTP cookies are cleared across page loads.

WRS does not support Service Workers and therefore generally does not use Speed Kit. We can demonstrate this using an example page and Google Search Console. The Google crawler aborts the Service Worker installation with the following error: `Rejected at ServiceWorkerContainer.wrsParams.serviceWorkers.navigator.serviceWorker.register(<anonymous>:10:852)`</anonymous>

Service Worker support for WRS is not planned for the future either. Unofficial sources, sometimes the best you can get on the subject of SEO, confirm this.

In addition, our request logs are regularly analyzed across customers and no requests from the Google crawler about Speed Kit appear there.

Speed Kit Doesn’t Cause Cloaking

Even if pages are cached with Speed Kit, the actual content for the user is always the same as that delivered by the original system (dynamic block feature).

Speed Kit Doesn’t Affect On-Site Tracking

Through dynamic blocks we exchange meta tags and the canonical URL, so that they always correspond to the original data. This ensures that any on-site tracking always reads the correct metadata of the page and is provided accordingly in tracking/ad marketing.