What good is having great content on a website if it doesn’t load in a timely manner? Take for example competing news websites, where essentially both have similar content about the same topic, but one website loads in 5 seconds, while the other takes 15 seconds, which would you rather read?Clearly the faster website is more desirable if loading times were a primary factor in your decision, and it seems that this is an aspect of websites that Google is taking into consideration when ranking mobile search results. According to Google, this change (dubbed the “Speed Update”) will be applicable starting from July 2018.
The company claims, “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.”
Basically Google will rank websites low in search results if it takes too long for it to load. To encourage developers to prevent this from happening, Google has asked them to take advantage of some of the company’s tools, such as the Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights that will help guide them towards creating a speedier, better experience, for their viewers.
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