How Site Speed Affects SEO & Audits

Site speed has a significant impact on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for several reasons:

1. User Experience (UX): Faster loading times lead to better user experience. Users are more likely to engage with and stay on a website that loads quickly. This reduces bounce rates and increases the likelihood of users exploring more pages within the site.
2. Search Engine Ranking: Search engines like Google consider site speed as one of the ranking factors. Websites that load quickly tend to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to slower-loading sites, all other factors being equal.
3. Crawl Budget: Search engine crawlers allocate a certain "crawl budget" to each website, which determines how frequently and deeply they crawl the site. Faster-loading pages allow search engines to crawl more pages within the allocated budget, leading to better indexation of the site's content.
4. Mobile Experience: With the increasing number of users accessing the internet through mobile devices, site speed becomes even more critical. Mobile users expect fast-loading pages, and search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites with good performance.
5. Core Web Vitals: Google has introduced Core Web Vitals as part of its ranking criteria, with factors like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) focusing on user experience, including site speed.

During an SEO audit, site speed is indeed assessed. SEO professionals typically use various tools and techniques to measure a website's speed, such as Google's PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom. These tools provide insights into various performance metrics, including page load times, server response times, and suggestions for improvement.

SEO audits usually include recommendations for optimizing site speed, which may involve actions like optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, reducing server response times, and improving overall website performance to enhance user experience and search engine visibility.