Your Website Is Slow and It’s Not Hurting Your Rankings

You know all of those spammy emails you get about how your website is ranking poorly on Google because of your low PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals score? It turns out that’s bullsh*t and we have the receipts.

You may have read about how we’ve been secretly building an AI law firm marketing platform called Sequoia (it’s been in the works for a few years, we sure know how to keep a secret.) One of the MANY features in our platform is a research tool that we use to generate empirical data by running large-scale, real-world studies, which we use to train our platform.

CLM Sequoia just finished analyzing 1,750 search results across America’s 50 largest cities for the most competitive personal injury keywords in the country. We ran every single URL through Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool to find out if your Page Speed matters for law Firm SEO.

Does PageSpeed Affect Your Rankings?

No. 🤯

The correlation between page speed and Google rankings is basically zero. The Pearson correlation came back at -0.0705. If you’re not a stats person, that number means there is no meaningful relationship between how fast your website loads and where Google puts you in search results.

None.

I’ve been in legal marketing for over 20 years. For most of that time, I’ve watched an entire industry grow up around the idea that faster websites rank higher, especially after mobile first indexing with mobile pagespeed scores being harder to achieve. Google said speed matters. Consultants built businesses around it. Agencies upsell speed optimization packages. Conference speakers put PageSpeed scores on slides and tell rooms full of lawyers they need to hit 90 or they’re never going to make it to the top of page one.

Even Google’s AI Overview is Lying to You

There have been broader studies that look at the internet at large but we wanted to zero in on what matters to our clients… law firms. So we went straight to the most competitive keyword sets in the law firm SEO world and looked at who was ranking where and what they’re PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals looked like.

The old common wisdom is not so wise. This claim that faster websites rank higher does not hold up.

What the Data Actually Shows About Law Firm Website Rankings and PageSpeed

Two-thirds of the pages sitting at position one for competitive personal injury keywords are failing Google’s own LCP threshold (LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, measures how quickly the largest visual element on a webpage loads, with a threshold of under 2.5 seconds deemed optimal). Not by a little. The average Largest Contentful Paint across all 1,750 results was over 8 seconds. Google says under 2.5 seconds is “good.” The pages dominating the most competitive legal keywords in the United States are loading more than three times slower than Google’s stated best practice standards.

And they’re ranking just fine at the top of page one.

On the other end, 64 pages in our dataset had near-perfect PageSpeed scores of 90 or higher. Every one of them was sitting at position five. Fast, well-optimized, technically clean. And outranked by slower competitors who brought better content, stronger authority, and real brand recognition to the table.

The average PageSpeed score across all top-five results was 64.9. That’s squarely in “needs improvement” territory by Google’s classification. The difference between the top three positions and positions four and five? Three points. Three points on a 100-point scale.

PageSpeed is a Vanity Metric for Lazy SEO Sales Reps

PageSpeed scores are easy to measure, easy to show a client, and easy to sell against. If your competitor’s site scores 40 and yours scores 85, it feels like you’re winning something. An agency can pull up Google’s office Lighthouse tool, point to a number, and say “see? We need to fix this.” It’s tangible. It’s visual. It makes for a great pitch deck.

It’s also easy for spammy cold pitches like “This law firm is ranking ahead of you because your pagespeed score is only 45.”

But it doesn’t move rankings. Not in any way we could find across all of the law firm websites in the most contested personal injury markets in America.

I think there’s a broader pattern here that lawyers need to understand about how SEO gets sold. A lot of what passes for “SEO strategy” is really just consultants optimizing for metrics that are easy to report on rather than metrics that drive results. PageSpeed scores. Domain Authority numbers from Moz or Ahrefs. Keyword density percentages. These are all things that look great in a monthly report and have little to no proven impact on where your firm shows up when someone searches for a lawyer.

The stuff that actually moves the needle is harder to measure, harder to sell, and takes longer to produce results. Building real authority through earned media and quality backlinks. Creating genuinely useful content that establishes your firm as the expert in your practice area and your market. Getting your local SEO fundamentals right. Demonstrating real expertise, real experience, and real trust signals that satisfy what Google calls E-E-A-T.

None of that fits neatly into a PageSpeed score and the spammer in your inbox has spent zero time thinking about exactly what your law firm needs to succeed.

Save the Hate Mail…Speed Still Matters for One Thing

I don’t want anyone reading this to think I’m saying page speed is irrelevant to your business. It absolutely matters for conversions. But I want to clarify that real-world page speed (how long users actually wait for your content to load) is NOT your PageSpeed Score. A lot of research, including our own, shows that when a page takes too long to load, conversions can suffer. If your users are clicking and seeing nothing but the spinwheel of death, they will leave.

So look at real-world load times through your UX monitoring system, not page speed scores.

What I’d Tell a Law Firm Today

Stop chasing PageSpeed scores is throwing money at a vanity metric. If your site isn’t catastrophically broken and it loads within a reasonable timeframe for a real human visitor, you’re fine from a ranking perspective. Spend your budget on content. Spend it on building authority. Spend it on local SEO. Spend it on the things that the data actually supports as ranking factors.

And if your current SEO provider is leading their monthly report with your PageSpeed score as a key performance indicator, ask them why and see if they come back with a generic chatGPT response that mimics the words of thousands of wrong SEO bloggers from the old days.

We looked at the data. All 1,750 data points of it. And the answer was clear. Your PageSpeed score does not affect your law firm’s rankings. You can read the full report and methodology on PageSpeed and rankings yourself.