Does page speed worth for SEO?

[Naghirniac]

I always broken my head to try to follow all pagespeed guidelines. I increase my pagespeed significantly, but i didnt saw any effect in my SEO performance.

In my keywords, my concorrents are crap on it (I have score of 90 and they are at 60-70).Does google gives importance to it?

[john4math]

Matt Cutts said at one point that page speed effects less than 1% of searches.  You can read more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/.

So, I wouldn't expect it to help much.  But think about how much happier your users will be!  That's where the real gains are. Over time, it might help you a bit in the SERPs because people should bounce less frequently as a function of how fast your pages load.

[Xee]

What I got from the article was that he said it's not something that you should worry too much about , but it's not something you should overlook either. He seemed to hint that since SEO is continuously evolving, it's best to be proactive when trying to better your visitors' experience. That's my take on it at least.

So, Naghirniac, I'm sure any benefit you would have gotten from increasing your page speed, you have already realized. It's probably better to focus your energy on opportunities with greater returns.

[Boogily]

My opinion, the page speed doesn't effect ranking. It does effect what happens after they are on your site. Waiting for a website to load can be a huge turnoff, so optimizing for pagespeed is important not for rankings, for conversions.

[KeriMorgret]

When the big update came through a little over two years ago about page speed, I was working on a site with load time issues. I did see quite the drop in organic referrals from Google after that update was pushed, while organic referrals from Bing and Yahoo continued to increase. I was working in-house at the time, so I don't have a lot of other sites to judge at that time, but I did see distinct change in that one site.

I also agree with you that load time affects users and their browsing and conversion behavior. And even though "everybody has broadband" there are a lot of people on poor public (or conference) wifi connections or on their phones, and pagespeed is quite important to them.