Google has announced that starting in July 2018, PageSpeed will become a ranking factor for mobile searches.
Here’s how it explained the update in a short blog post:
The “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 queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page.
Back in November 2014, Google started labelling sites as “mobile-friendly” in search results. This was to show searchers, pages that had been optimised for phones. This label was then dropped in August 2016 as most sites had become “mobile-friendly.”
Google is now using its influence to speed up the web by encouraging website owners, and developers, to pay particular attention to how fast their sites load on mobiles.
They aren’t giving much detail away but here are some pointers:
- Google says that the Speed Update will mainly impact the websites which deliver the “slowest experience” to users, although they haven’t given a benchmark by which we can judge if a site falls into this category.
- Relevant content is still the main ranking factor so “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.”
- Google wants developers to “think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”
To check the speed of your site, you can use Google’s PageSpeed tool. Just enter the address of the page you want to test and it will analyze it for you.
On the speed results page, along with the speed score for desktop and mobile, you’ll also see suggestions on how to improve the speed of your site. Most of the suggestions will be fairly techy so you’ll need to get your web developer to implement them. If your site is built on WordPress, there’s a great plugin called W3 Total Cache that, with a little tweaking, can vastly improve your Google Speed Score.
In summary, if you rely on organic traffic to your site, check your site speed score, particularly on mobile, and take action before July to help prevent a dip in mobile traffic.