Folks often ask me whether site load time affects their SEO, and the short answers is: Yes!
The importance of having a site that loads fast (or at least adequately fast) can be imputed from the fact that search engines want to point users towards reputable and high-quality sites that match their search queries. A slow site that hangs forever is not a good experience for the user, and by extension, for the search engine that led that user there.
The fact that Google's webmaster tools reports on crawl speed (time spent downloading a page), shows that they're watching (aren't they always?). Also, I've noticed a direct correlation between the faster load times translating to more pages crawled per day (which should mean better indexing of your content).
More recently though, Google's top SEO oracle (technically the head of it's web spam team), Matt Cutts, laid it out for us (covered here by SEO Moz): Although slow load times will NOT adversely affect your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. So, keep those sites scaling and those pages loading as fast as you can!
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