Does page load speed affects Seo?

[Doodled]

Without a doubt, yes it does and here's why:

It doesn't matter whether or not search engines like Google actually take page load time into account, what they do take into account is your bounce rate. So if you page takes 15 seconds to load most internet users are going to hit the back button. Your bounce rate will go up and your rankings will go down.

But remember it is all in comparison to your competition for any given keyword and it is a factor. Therefore is you have little competition for a particular keyword then Google will rank you highly even if the page loads slowly - it just doesn't have anything better to offer.

Further if users react very well to the content, they share it / link to it / etc. then Google has no choice but to conclude that although the page loads slowly it must contain content of value and so should rank highly.

Where most doing SEO go wrong is to start worrying about "half seconds". The start thinking "Does it matter if it takes 3 seconds to load or would 2.5 seconds help my rankings?". Answer - if it is not noticable to humans it won't make any difference at all.

Then there is the difference between content load and full load. So some of my websites load the main content and then load items like the menu based on the size of screen the user has. Then it loads widgets from Facebook, Google, etc.

In total it can take up to 10 seconds to load a page but the main content - what the visitor actually came to look at - appears in the first two seconds so they can get on with taking in the content while the other bits load up. This type of long loading won't affect your bounce rate and so won't affect your rankings.