: Will the Google web crawler stop crawling and indexing pages that take longer than 2.8 seconds to load? I just received this statement from my client: our PR company works on ads for us

@Heady270

In 2010 Google announced that page loading speed was a ranking factor. As far as I am aware, Google has never put an official number on how many seconds your site needs to load in. Rather they say:


Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation


After this announcement, many web site owners tried to optimize for speed and reported how their rankings changed. We found that:


Google only penalizes very slow sites. Their slow page penalty only applies to the initial page load (before images, and scripts). If the initial page load is greater than seven seconds, Google will downgrade rankings.
Optimizing the site speed for users can have positive SEO implications. This is probably due to usability ranking factors rather than to direct measurements of site speed by Google. Getting the page to load above the fold and be ready to use in under 3 seconds can improve search engine rankings. Further improvements can have positive user experience results (such as better conversions) but don't tend to lead to better search engine rankings.


The 2.8 seconds that you state is very similar to the 3 seconds that I have seen confirmed experimentally. However, this has never been a statement directly from Google as far as I am aware. Google will certainly crawl and index sites that take longer than 2.8 seconds to load.

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