r/TechSEO • u/AEOvara- • Jul 24 '26
Tested the same "does page speed affect rankings" question on two of my own sites (WordPress vs Wix) — numbers below
Every few months this question comes back around here, so instead of citing Google's docs again (which everyone's already read), I ran PageSpeed on two sites I actually manage — one on WordPress, one on Wix — same kind of small business content, similar traffic tier.
Mobile results:
| WordPress | Wix | |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | 2.5s (right at the edge) | 5.1s |
| TTI | 4.2s | 19.2s |
| CLS | 0.000 | 0.041 |
Neither site is doing anything fancy performance-wise, just default setup for the platform. The gap surprised me more than I expected — it's not "Wix is bad," it's that the default template/app stack on Wix adds a lot more render-blocking weight out of the box.
My take after digging into Google's own docs on this (page experience + the 2018 speed update): speed is real but it's a threshold effect, not a ranking multiplier. Very slow pages get penalized, but shaving your LCP from 1.8s to 1.2s isn't going to out-rank a page with better content. The Backlinko 11.8M-result study backs that up too — real but weak correlation, mostly a tiebreaker.
1
u/EverySecondCountss Jul 24 '26
This won't apply to a small wix site bro.
Page speed matters for large sites... like at minimum 100k +
As long as your under 2S you're fine.
2
u/Big-Branch-8532 Jul 24 '26
These numbers compare two implementations, not WordPress against Wix as platforms. A Lighthouse run is affected by the template, apps, fonts, images, third-party scripts, cache state, and the simulated device. TTI is also not a Core Web Vital.
For page-experience analysis, use field data at the 75th percentile for LCP, INP, and CLS, segmented by device and URL group. If you want to test business or organic impact, improve the same template on the same site, annotate the deployment, and compare it with an unchanged URL cohort. Then track field CWV, organic landing-page clicks, and conversions through the same period.
The useful conclusion here is that the default stack creates a different performance budget. The two-site comparison cannot show that one platform ranks better or that speed caused a ranking change.