IT’S OFFICIAL; WITH THE RISE IN INCREASE MOBILE INTERNET TRAFFIC, PAGE SPEED WILL BE A RANKING FACTOR FOR MOBILE SEARCHES AS OF JULY 2018, GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED.
The page speed update will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small number of queries. The update doesn’t discriminate and will apply the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build it.
While the page load speed will be a ranking factor, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly due to great and relevant content.
While there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, Google recommends the following resources to evaluate a page’s performance:
- Chrome User Experience Report; 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 of web pages.
- PageSpeed Insights; a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimisations.
While the PageSpeed Insights tool recently went through an update to use data from the Chrome User Experience Report, it doesn’t have enough data to reliably measure smaller sites. For sites that are not in the Chrome UX Report data set, the search engine giant recommends using Lighthouse to evaluate the performance of a page.
Google has been promising to look at mobile page speed since saying that page speed was a ranking factor, but only for desktop searches. Now, in July 2018, it will look at how fast your mobile pages are and use that as a ranking factor in mobile search.