Does Page Speed Actually Affect Rankings for Small Sites? My Analysis
Google has included page speed as a ranking signal for years and made it more prominent with the Core Web Vitals update. But most of the evidence you read about page speed and rankings comes from large-scale studies of major websites. What about small sites with limited traffic and domain authority?
I spent four months analysing the relationship between page speed improvements and ranking changes across several small sites to see whether the correlation held at smaller scale.
The Sites and Their Starting Point
The sites I tracked were each under two years old, had fewer than 50 published articles, and were receiving between 500 and 3000 organic visitors per month. None had significant domain authority. All were on shared or basic managed hosting.
Initial PageSpeed Insights scores ranged from 38 to 62 on mobile. all in the poor to needs improvement range. The most common issues were unoptimised images, render-blocking JavaScript from plugins, and no caching configured.
The Improvements Made
For each site, I made three standard optimisations: compressed all images and converted where possible to WebP format, installed a caching plugin and configured it properly, and removed or deferred plugins that were adding unnecessary JavaScript to the front end.
After these changes, mobile PageSpeed scores improved to between 68 and 84. Not perfect, but a significant improvement from where they started.
What Happened to Rankings
The results were mixed in an interesting way. For articles that were already ranking in positions one to five, page speed improvements produced little to no measurable change. These pages were already ranking highly and speed was not the limiting factor.
For articles ranking in positions eight to twenty, several showed ranking improvements in the weeks following the speed optimisations. The improvement was not dramatic. typically two to five positions. But it was consistent enough across multiple sites to suggest a real correlation rather than coincidence.
What This Suggests
Page speed appears to matter most as a tiebreaker rather than a primary ranking driver. When your content quality, keyword targeting, and authority are comparable to competing pages, a faster site may give you an edge. When your content significantly outclasses the competition, speed matters less.
For small sites competing in moderately competitive niches, the practical implication is clear: fix obvious speed issues, but do not obsess over achieving a perfect score at the expense of content quality. A page that loads in 2.5 seconds with excellent content will outrank a page that loads in 1.2 seconds with average content. Get to good enough on speed, then focus your energy on the content.
