Page Speed And SEO In 2025
Page speed doesn't just matter for user experience, but also for search engine optimization (SEO).
In this article we'll take a look at what page speed is, how it's measured, and how it can impact your Google rankings.
What is page speed?
Page speed measures how quickly pages on your website load when a visitor opens them. The faster your website loads and can see content the better!
You'll often see rendering filmstrip like this when investigating the performance of a website. It shows the page load process as the website starts rendering.
How is page speed measured?
To measure page speed we generally look at how soon after navigating to a website the page has loaded. But page load time is a fuzzy concept: there's no single point in time where a website is done loading.
That's why the filmstrip in the previous section is annotated with several annotations marking different rendering milestones.
Let's take a look at what these metrics mean!
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Time to First Byte is a technical metric that tells you how quickly the website server responded to the request sent by the browser.
That doesn't mean anything visible has changed. TTFB is a purely technical metric, making an important stage in the page load process. But it doesn't tell you what the visitor can see at that point – often they can see nothing at all.
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
The First Contentful Paint measures how quickly the visitor can start to see some page content, for example text or an image.
This is an important page speed metric, because it tells you something about the visitor experience. At the very least they now know that the page is starting to load, and they can also start exploring your page content.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The Largest Contentful Paint is usually the most important page load milestone. Now the user can't just see any content – they can see the biggest content element, like an hero image or the a large heading. Some small parts of the page might still change later on (like a chat widget appearing), but the page content is basically ready when the LCP happens.
To analyze and optimize the Largest Contentful Paint, it's important to look at the largest content element on the page. Is it text or an image? If it's an image, how large is the image? Diving into questions like these helps you understand why the page takes as long to load as it does and sets you up to start rolling out improvements.
More ways to measure page speed
You'll sometimes see other metrics used to measure page speed, for example Speed Index or Time to Interactive. You can check out our detailed guide to website performance metrics, but the three metrics we mentioned above are the most important ones to measure the initial page load time.
Why is page speed important for SEO?
Search engines look at your page speed to decide how you should rank in their search results. For example, Google uses a set of metrics called the Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. The Largest Contentful Paint metrics we've looked at already is one of these Core Web Vitals metrics.
The other two Core Web Vitals are Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). CLS looks at whether page content moves around after it appears, and INP measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions.
What page speed do I need for good SEO?
To get a good score your website needs to load within 2.5 seconds, as measured by the Largest Contentful Paint metric. Google considers it a good user experience if your website's main content appears within that time frame.
You'll get a "Poor" rating from Google if your website takes more than 4 seconds to load.
To pass the full Google Core Web Vitals assessment you also need to perform well on the other two web vitals, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout shift.
How important is page speed for SEO?
The Core Web Vitals are a key component of Google's technical SEO assessment of your website. But your technical implementation is not the most important factor for Google decide where you should show up in rankings. Content quality is more important.
Google's search relations team lead, John Mueller, has said this about the importance of Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you'd see a big drop just because of that. That said, having a website that provides a good experience for users is worthwhile, because if users are so annoyed that they don't want to come back, you're just wasting the first-time visitors to your site, regardless of where they come from.
How to check the page speed of your website
A number of free tools are available to check your page speed online. One good place to start is the free DebugBear speed test.
It will analyze your website, show you how it loads, generate a detailed technical report, and provide custom recommendations for how to speed up your website.
This tool is where the rendering filmstrip and LCP element view from earlier are taken from.
DebugBear provides a lot of data. If you're looking for a simpler overview, try Google's PageSpeed Insights tool instead.
At the top you'll get a quick summary of how fast your website is for real users. Google collects this data from logged-in Chrome users as part of the Chrome User Experience report (CrUX).
Page speed data from the CrUX report is what Google uses as an SEO ranking factor.
Below the real-user summary, Google also shows more detailed synthetic performance data including recommendations to improve your website speed.
However, keep in mind that this PageSpeed Insights data isn't always reliable.
You can also use Google's Lighthouse tool to test your website directly from your computer.
You'll get an overall Performance score as well as more insight on how your page loads.
Many tools, including DebugBear and PageSpeed Insights, are built on top of Lighthouse. But there are significant differences in how they collect data under the hood and the reporting functionality they offer.
How to monitor page speed
If you want to get the SEO benefits from having good page speed, you need to make sure that your website is fast consistently. That's where a Core Web Vitals monitoring tool like DebugBear comes in.
DebugBear combines three types of page speed data to give you a comprehensive view of your website performance:
- Scheduled lab-based tests with in-depth reports
- Google CrUX data tracking for SEO
- Real user monitoring across your entire website
See how your pages are doing at a glance, before diving in to find optimizations or identify the cause of a page speed regression.
You can monitor both your own site and those of your competitors.
The CrUX data dashboard is a great way to benchmark your website within your industry and see whether you're improving or getting worse.
Monitor Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
DebugBear monitoring includes:
- In-depth Page Speed Reports
- Automated Recommendations
- Real User Analytics Data