Correlation relating to page speed and SERPS results

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jody Nesbitt: pure SERP or conversion/bounce as well
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  Dan Thies: 1) Huh? If you mean "does it take longer to rank, " we don`t need a study to know that any usability or performance issues will delay results by dampening the human response. On average, fewer links, shares, referrals, etc. 2) It affects the page, the site, the brand, conversion, everything. At the search engine there are page level signals producing a cumulative effect on the site. The site is also affected by crawl budget. 3) In the short term, code changes that affect speed will take effect as they crawl and index. Performance improvement of other kinds (server, header, cdn, etc) are going to take longer. I suspect Alan has charts.
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  Neil Cheesman: Not `longer to rank` - say for an existing site... and obviously there are MANY other issues that affect rankings but I was curious to know if anyone had any information they would care to share etc specifically relating to page/site speed etc...
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Every site is, of course, a complex layering of intertwined factors. So where one site may see increased rankings just from speed improvement, another may not. And yes, I have had clients, where ALL they did, was fix speed issues, and moved up across many phrases, some into top organic position. Given the complexity of factors though, and no way to know which one or more specific factors may be the shift point, this is why I rarely do partial audits - better to identify all the things. And encourage clients to improve as much as possible, across the full spectrum of important issues, within reason.
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  William Atchison: If you`re in a competitive area you better deliver fast. Like using a CMS that writes pages to stand alone file so it`s not bogged down searching the database for every page view, it just serves up the flat file. Those CMS systems so use a database, don`t get me wrong, they just write a copy of the page to be served as a single file. I think even WP has options to do this. The less code between you and the browser the better.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Meanwhile, as Dan points out, there is better UX. That speed improvement may not, itself, move rankings. Yet it may may increase conversion rates, so that is yet another reason it matters.