Pages loading under 1 second get the most impressions. The spread is ~63% — fast pages clearly attract more search visibility.
Bottom line: Sub-1s load time is a clear impressions advantage.
The x-axis shows load time buckets from fastest to slowest. Each bar shows relative impressions for pages in that bucket. Look for the tallest bar under 1 second and the steady drop as load time increases. The full spread between buckets is about 63%.
Many SEOs treat speed as a UX task, not a ranking task. That thinking leaves easy impressions on the table. We bucketed 35K+ unique pages by load time and compared relative impressions. Pages loading under 1 second got the most impressions, with a ~63% spread between speed buckets.
Split by <1s, 1–2s, 2–3s, and 3s+ to see where impressions are trapped.
Use DevTools Coverage and Network to list top JS and image payloads.
Remove or delay the worst offender and re-check field metrics after rollout.
Fail builds when templates exceed agreed limits.
LCP tracks when the main content becomes useful. Miss it and you lose visibility on competitive queries.
Slow servers delay every render step and every bot fetch. High TTFB can cap crawl and slow re-ranking after updates.
Heavy JS delays interactivity and can block rendering. Too much JS also raises CPU time on mobile devices.
Images are often the biggest bytes on the page. Uncompressed images push pages out of the fast bucket.
Desktop hides mobile CPU and network delays, so you miss the real bottleneck.
Lighthouse wins do not guarantee better real-user speed or more impressions.
Single-page tweaks do not move the site-wide distribution that search sees.
Speed gains that move rankings usually come from removing work, not tuning settings. Strip third-party scripts first, then reduce JS execution on the main thread. Many sites improve load time but leave render-blocking JS, so the page still feels slow and stays in a worse bucket.
All data comes from real websites tracked by SEOJuice. We use the latest snapshot per page so each page counts once, regardless of site size. We filter for pages with at least 10 Google Search Console impressions and valid ranking positions (1-100).
Data is refreshed weekly. Correlation does not imply causation — these insights show associations, not guaranteed outcomes.
We compared readability scores against relative impressions across 17K+ unique pages.
We analyzed word counts across 35K+ unique pages and compared relative impressions.
We measured how description-to-content consistency correlates with click-through rates.
SEOJuice tracks all these metrics automatically and helps you improve them.
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