SEO and speed have been quite a while two words that have remained together in this industry for quite a while. Core Web Vitals has been one of the most used benchmarks when it comes to checking the performance and health of a website. With this tool, Google hinted that speed was a key factor involved in rank performance.
At the same time, there have been people who have been saying that this is not important. However, these are the same people that have been saying for quite a while that crawl budget is irrelevant… and that’s where things need to start to take shape, these two are linked.
For more than a decade, good developers have taken advantage of the importance of making a site fast… and this is because it makes it easier to crawl, easier to render, and easier to parse for the Google bot.
For quite a while, certain specialists have found no correlation between speed and first-page ranking, until recently they have been proven wrong as more things are getting discovered.
SEO and Speed… What’s going on?
If you look at the rankings for any given keyword and look at the top results while checking the Core Web Vitals for them, you will probably see too much relation between speed and position in the results.
But then… is pears and apples… the relevancy of a search result to the query has much more to do, rather than just the speed of the website. So there’s no conclusive point at this point.
SEO and Speed: The crawl budget appears
If people don’t understand speed, then the crawl budget is even less understood. People tend to believe that the crawl budget, is the SITE budget per se. It is instead the capacity that Google has to crawl and how much of it will be spent on your website.
If they are going to crawl a website, but it is not fast enough, then the crawlers will spend a tad bit of the budget, and then they will go elsewhere where they can find better performance and leave your site behind and your site stop being indexed.
So… in summary
It is important to have your site optimized for speed because the faster your site is, the more pages will be crawled from your website. As a direct step from that, as more pages are crawled, more parts of your sites will get indexed. Then, as more pages of your website are indexed, your chances to rank will increase considerably and this of course will translate into traffic for your website.
So… have your speed in check!
