The speed for the website is very important in SEO, because if the website are too slow then Google would either remove it from the search engines or put it in the lowest for keywords search. You can check it at woorank, but if the websites are too slow Google webmasters will send you a warning and if it's not solved by either contact your host provider or switch to a different web host then Google would take a action due to slow load. Google hates slow speed and so do traffic, so speed should be the #1 on the list when it comes to running websites.
You can test your site's speed here: http://www.webpagetest.org/ However, all of the web based tools for speed testing should be used as guides only; they do give a good indication of what may need addressing, but there are a lot of variables that go into the actual (and percieved) speed of your site and some of them you cannot do anything about (for example, third-party ad javascript calls). What is your site URL and what country is it currently hosted in?
I can't reveal the URL but I can tell you we are hosted in New Jersey. We have many client coming from China. I work with http://www.webpagetest.org/ but I am looking for a real user data, how can I know if there is a tech issue or not?
Just FYI, you can get a general idea of your page download speed in Google Webmaster Tools > Crawl > Crawl Stats.
Guys, again, thank you very much. Tools like pingdom and webpagetest are 1 time tests and can't tell me about all my users, I'm trying to correlate between my real users and their performance.
It's not just important for SEO, but also one of the main factors that could make your website's visitors LEAVE your website... About SEO, I am not sure if it's an IMPORTANT factor...
Yeah, site load time is important for Google. A slow site may have many causes. The host makes up a lot of your speed. If you are on a server with many sites you will go slow no matter what you try so if your cpanel loads slow as well as your site switch hosts or ask to be moved to another server. Try a tools.pingdom.com speed test and see what is taking so long to load on your site I had a png header that was killing me changed it to a jpg to speed up one of my sites. Also run firebug in mozilla to see any console errors in JS or CSS. and then try to install the w3 plugin. I have heard that cloudflare works for some people I did not have a good experience with them so your mileage may vary.
Its effect on SEO as patco says as well as effect on PPC. if you are doing PPC so users came to your landing page page speed is low it will effect on your conversion. you drop customers reason why we do SEO and PPC for business to get more customers. You can try GTMETRIX for better page solution.
Do any of you use Google Analytics for this purpose? to try and understand if page performance is affecting conversion? is it possible?
Google Analytics results are not accurate enough. Use tools.pingdom.com and run the test. After that, go to gtmetrix.com and run few tests over there to. Compare the results. If none of them are good, install the WordPress plugin which analyzes the speed thoroughly and gives you possible solutions to your problem. Speed does affect SEO but rarely affects conversion. Only in cases where your site loading speed pass 8 seconds and that's when users usually leave upset because your website hasn't loaded on time. Also, you could take use of ''Average time'' and ''Bounce Rate'' options in your Google Analytics account. If you see your visitors leaving very quickly, then your conversion is affected. It can be speed that is causing them to leave so soon but in most cases it's about the design and it's about the content.
I agree with that, it`s one of the factors google takes when rank your website, it`s really important for ranks, but not only for SEO, it`s most important to your audience, no one like wait long to load a website most of the people will probably close a window, try to find a fast SSD hosting with 1GBPs connection to the Internet, it should help. Of course optimizing of the script is another story I don`t know what kind of script you are using but if it`s wordpress for example you could use very usefull plugin W3Cache (as I remember).