Does site speed affect Google rankings?
Short answer
Yes, a little. Google says its ranking systems use page experience signals, including the Core Web Vitals, but relevance counts for far more, and a fast page with a weak answer won't outrank a slower page with a better one. The stronger reason to fix a slow site is that customers give up on it.
Yes, site speed affects Google rankings, but modestly, and nobody outside Google can tell you by how much. Google has said publicly that its ranking systems take page experience into account, and that they use the Core Web Vitals, its three measurements of how a page loads, how quickly it reacts and whether it holds still. Google has also said that relevance comes first. Speed is one input among many, and a small one.
What Google has said, and what it hasn’t
Google’s systems try to show the most relevant content even when the experience on the page is poor. Where many pages answer a search about equally well, a good page experience can help. Both statements come from Google’s published guidance, and read together they describe something close to a tiebreaker.
Google hasn’t published a weight. Anyone who tells you speed is a set share of the ranking formula is guessing. As far as Google has described it, its systems look at the experience of real visitors, not the score from zero to one hundred that a speed test gives after loading the page once. So a better test score, on its own, isn’t evidence that anything Google uses has changed.
Where speed can make a difference to ranking
It matters most when you and a competitor are otherwise close. Take two hypothetical roofing companies in Escondido with similar pages about tile roof repair and similar reputations. If one site is quick and steady on a phone and the other is slow and jumpy, speed is one of the few things left to separate them.
It matters least when the gap is somewhere else. A fast page that says little about tile roof repair won’t pass a slower page that answers the question properly. The map results are a different case again. On whether your website affects your Google Maps ranking, Google describes map ranking in terms of relevance, distance and prominence, with no mention of how quickly the website loads.
One narrower effect: a server that responds very slowly can limit how much of a site Google fetches. That’s a real concern for sites with many thousands of pages. On a typical contractor site it isn’t.
The reason that matters more than ranking
The larger cost of a slow site is the customer who never sees it. A person with water coming through the ceiling is on a phone, in a hurry, with a results page full of other companies one tap away. If your page is still drawing itself, they go back and tap the next one. Ranking first doesn’t help if the visit ends before the phone number appears.
The same applies to paid traffic. With Google Ads you pay for the click whether or not the page finishes loading, so a slow landing page wastes money you have already spent. Speed work earns its keep here, in calls from visitors you were already getting, more reliably than it does in rankings.
Measuring before and after
Speed work may move your rankings or it may not. That depends on what else separates you from the companies above you, so I don’t promise a ranking gain from it. I measure first: what real visitors on phones experience, along with where you rank and how many visitors call. Then I make the change and measure again about two weeks later. The report shows what rankings did, including when they didn’t move.
If your site already passes Google’s current thresholds, I’d tell you that further speed work is a poor use of money. If it falls short of how fast a home-service website should load, the next step is site speed and Core Web Vitals work.