Site Speed
Site speed shows how fast your website loads and works for visitors. This Technical SEO factor affects rankings because slow pages frustrate users and hurt User Signals that impact search positions. Speed itself is not a direct ranking factor, but meeting user expectations for fast loading improves engagement signals without any magic pass/fail threshold.
Speed gets better by preloading fonts and other key page elements, using height and width attributes on images, and lazy loading elements below the fold. Modern image formats work with the picture tag to let browsers pick the best image for each screen size. Core Web Vitals tracks Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift to keep users happy instead of giving them time to complain while waiting. Heavy JavaScript usage can slow pages down and require JavaScript SEO work to fix the problems.
Performance Monitoring tools help track loading metrics and find what needs fixing. Redirect Management should use one hop to get users to the right page quickly. Mobile Optimization needs extra attention since mobile users leave sites that take more than three seconds to load.