In the long-term, Chrome’s goal will be to identify and badge websites offering “high-quality” experiences, which may include other factors beyond just the website’s speed. However, the goal will be to make these “good user experiences” something any quality web developer can achieve.

A faster, more user friendly web benefits Google, as it helps the company cater to its primarily mobile users. Since 2015, the majority of Google users start their searches from mobile devices. But that shift has required new ways of indexing and ranking pages and serving users whose connection speeds vary and who may not have powerful devices.

Google now indexes website using mobile first technology when indexing its pages, and it offers fast AMP pages to help mobile users get to information more quickly. It makes sense that a next step would be to nudge site owners themselves to speed things up or risk getting labeled as a “slow” website.

Speed has been one of Chrome’s core principles since the beginning – constantly working to give users an experience that is instant as they browse the web. We have all visited web pages we thought would load fast, only to be met by an experience that could have been better.

We have always believed that user experience should be important and always evolving. Having a stale outdated slow website is no longer an option. “The web can do better.” a philosophy that we stand behind with Google.

Does your website load slow? We can find out with a free evaluation. Call us today.

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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.

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