Page speed will soon affect your mobile ranking
Back Posted on 20 Jan 2018
Google announced on Wednesday that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
Site speed has been a ranking factor since April 2010. The new announcement is a predictable update to the 2010 changes which focused on desktop searches because common sense and countless studies tell us users want your website to be fast.
When the update kicks in it means if your website is slow you run a real risk of falling in rank against faster competitors. The only way around the new metric is if your website offers highly valuable, unique information that is not available anywhere else.
The biggest factors making your website slow are almost always the basics including
- poorly optimised code
- poorly optimised images
- budget server
This means is is often relatively straight forward to achieve significant gains which means happy customers and better search ranking.
Test your speed now
A quick way to test how fast your website is with Pingdom Tools. Enter the URL to test, select the closest location to test from and hit Start Test.
The results will tell you the load time, in the example below 632ms which is faster than 95% of sites tested.
Small business websites should strive to load in under 2 seconds. Any longer and 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load [1].
If you’d like to chat about how to make sure your website peed doesn't turn users or Google away call 0845 094 2402 or find me on Google+ or LinkedIn.