We had a problem with one of our database sites not getting indexed as well as we have come to expect. After about a month it still only had arround 10% of the urls indexed from the sitemaps. We looked at the differences between this and other sites we had which were all going well. The only difference we could see was the page speed which was OK in practice because the above the fold content loaded first but on Google webmasters tools was hideous, with average page load times up to six seconds. We made some changes and reworked some MYSQL magic, removed some features that relied on external http requests and did our utmost to get it up to speed.
The results are below which I think speak for themselves. The second chart is impressions but the massive increase is simply down to the site going from 10% of pages indexed to 30% within a week and of course it is still going up.
Makes you wonder about all those wordpress sites which hang for ages due to the excessive amount of plugins and widgets. The site is new and I wondered if page load speed was slowing down the crawlers but the crawl rate was still pretty good. So if the pages were getting crawled but not indexed it would suggest Google is considering page speed when indexing, they are almost certainly then considering when calculating positions in the search engine results pages.
If you’re site is classed as slow in Webmasters Tools it would suggest you are missing out on traffic and therefore revenue.
