Google’s New Speed Update is now rolling out for all users.
We live in a face paced world full of the need to get instant answers. I find myself “Googling” things all day long especially on my mobile device. I much like many of my friends want to be able to find answers to our questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page (I know I’ve been know to get frustrated when a page doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds). Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was originally only focused on desktop searches. Today Google announced that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
The “Google Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of those queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
Although there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, here are some resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.
- Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions
- Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages
- PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations
Here are some stats to see how your website speed stacks up to industry benchmarks for mobile speed.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please visit our webmaster forums.