Page speed to become a ranking factor in mobile search from July - Google

Posted by Edith MacLeod on 23 Jan, 2018
View comments Keyword Research
Google has confirmed that page speed will become a ranking factor for mobile searches starting in July 2018.

 

Google says only a small percentage of queries will be affected and slow pages may still rank highly if they have high quality, relevant content.

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.

Source: Google blog

As the change comes into effect in July, webmasters have time to make sure their site performs well.

Google recommends using a number of their tools to check and evaluate page performance:

Lighthouse audits the quality of web pages (including performance, accessibility and more)
Page Speed Insights indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and makes improvement suggestions
Chrome User Experience Report provides experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.

See Google’s blog post for full details.

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