Is splash page as index.html a bad idea?

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

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  Richard Hearne: Bad. Very bad. For SEO, terribly bad. For UX probably even worse.
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Richard Hearne Thanks
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  Michael Martinez: Bounces have no affect on SEO whatsoever.
  
  Google calculates a PAGE`s speed on just the page itself. There is not "site speed". When they talk about "slow Websites" they mean the hosts where the average length of time it takes to fetch a group of URLs in a recent time frame, not "George`s Website is always slow".
  
  So what is clocked as a "slow site" today could have fast-loading pages or it could be clocked as a "fast site" tomorrow, all without any changes from the site owner.
  
  Page loading speed is determined by server load and capacity.
  
  What many people think of as "site speed" is really "page rendering time" or a combination of "page loading time" and "page rendering time".
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  Sam Mah: Michael Martinez, why the bounce rate doesn`t have an impact on SEO? I thought this is an indicator of how relevant are your contents. No?
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  Michael Martinez: Sam Mah No, bounce rate doesn`t have anything to do with relevance.
  
  Google has acknowledged using click analysis in two areas of search:…See More
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Michael Martinez I thought that ThinkWithGoogle site tester was about checking the loading time...
  
  I usually decrease the image size by changing the format...
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  Michael Martinez: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy Think With Google is just one of many parts of the Google, Inc. company. It`s not a window into how the search engines work.
  
  The TWG site speed tool is concerned with improving user experience. To the user a site or page is fast if they see something appear on the screen very quickly and it`s slow if they must wait for something to appear.
  
  So what TWG`s tool is doing is approximating a user experience against an arbitrary scale.
  
  It is also woefully inaccurate.
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Michael Martinez So shrinking loading times won`t matter? I take all of my PNGs and change them to JPG or render the quality down at 50% and by so changed my personal loading time from 2.5 seconds to 1...
  
  I understand that it is relative to each one and his own hardware and connection but it does not really matter?
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: I understand if my theory is correct is that I need to make sure that all pages are loading fast...
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  Michael Martinez: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy "So shrinking loading times won`t matter?"
  
  Improving the user`s experience is always good for your Website, even if it has little to no effect on search engine optimization.
  
  Google has repeatedly confirmed that only the very slowest of Websites are adversely affected by their algorithms` speed assessments.
  
  As for bounce rates, they don`t affect rankings.
  
  People who visit a site may share links to it on social media, in Web forums, or on their blogs if they like the site. The site`s performance may impact their willingness to create such links but many people will wait a little longer for information they believe is worthwhile.
  
  If your pages are loading in 1 second or less you`re doing fine - above fine. If you`re agonizing over site speed in the hope of improving SEO you`re not accomplishing anything.
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Michael Martinez I understand what you are telling me... for example I am running 285 tabs right now on 4 different browsers and multiple background processes are running on my computer and this will easily cause my speeds to drop in loading websites which will not be logically fair in SEO if they would rank negatively because of me. Thanks
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  Richard Hearne: Hang on. Let`s be clear here. The OP states:
  
  "Splash page as index.html is a bad idea?
  
  My theory is that it will load faster + will have high engagement rate."
  
  Adding in a splash page wont make the pages behind it any faster. You`re not shrinking anything that users want by replacing a page with a splash page in front of it. If your pages are so slow that it hurts user engagement, then fixing your performance issues is far more likely to improve UX than adding a fast splash page in front of those pages. It`s also not 1999.
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  Michael Martinez: Richard Hearne You`re right. The discussion has ranged all over the place. I intentionally did not address the question about splash pages because I didn`t want to open a can of semantic worms.
  
  And it looks like I did anyway.
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  Richard Hearne: Michael Martinez apologies - that wasn`t entirely directed at you. At least that was not my intention.
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  Michael Martinez: Richard Hearne No need to apologize. I think we should all agree I flubbed this question.
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Richard Hearne The splash is useless because it seems that loading speed is useless for google ranking...
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  Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Richard Hearne I wanted to create a splash page for a gsap website so it will load twice to cache the website... It took me 8 seconds prior and I was scared it hurts the ranking
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  Richard Hearne: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy Nobody said that. You`re now playing mental gymnastics with wording. Adding a splash page does nothing to speed up the content that people want. If you think speed is negatively impacting your users, then I suggest you directly fix that issue.
  
  Don`t try to load your entire website. Very few people will want to view every page, and this technique doesn`t scale well as you grow your content. There are some clever methods for preloading pages that you can use, but what you`re talking about isn`t one of them.