Google has announced that staring in 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
According to Google, “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. 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 claims that though speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Now that mobile is becoming more relevant in our society, I guess this is why they want to now focus on mobile searches. It has always been touted that currently 60% of searches are from mobile devices.
Google shared the current industry benchmarks for mobile page speed.
Google is encouraging developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.
It suggests the following sites to assist in evaluating 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
