Why is it important? When search engines crawl a website (read the pages & content on a website), they have a certain threshold for how long to wait for a page to load before moving on. The page speed, or how many seconds it takes to load a page and its entire contents is very important not to just search engines, but also to user experience.

Having a slow page speed can cause search engine crawling issues as well as increase bounce rates for users that leave the page because it’s taking too long to load.

Improving your page speed involves a number of steps, here are a few recommendations:

1. Optimize your images: Large, high-resolution images can slow down your page significantly. Make sure your images are appropriately sized and consider using formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP that often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG.

2. Minimize HTTP requests: Each piece of your webpage requires a separate HTTP request to load, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render.

3. Minify and combine files: This means that you should reduce the size of each file, as well as the total number of files. This is applicable to your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

4. Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files: By default, CSS and JavaScript files are render-blocking. They can be loaded in two different ways: Synchronously (or in the order they appear on your page) and asynchronously (at the same time).

5. Defer JavaScript loading: Deferring a file means preventing it from loading until after other elements have loaded.

6. Reduce server response time: Your server response time is affected by the amount of traffic you receive, the resources each page uses, the software your server uses, and the hosting solution you use.

7. Use a content distribution network (CDN): CDNs, like Cloudflare, can help you cache your site and serve your content from servers that are close to your visitors.

8. Enable compression: Use a software application for file compression, like Gzip, to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.

Remember, page speed is important not only to users, but also to search engines. So, it's worth taking the time to improve it.