After launching New Rich Results Testing Tool, now it has announced the “Page Speed” as the ranking factor for mobile searches.
Fast! Fast! And Fast! Is the only word comes into the mind of a user when a web page takes few more seconds to upload. People care about speed of a web page in mobile but does Google care about it? Although the speed has been the critical parameter for the Google in ranking but the pivot was only the desktop searches.
Read Also: 8 Amazing Ways to Boost Your Website Loading Speed
The online traffic mobile is attracting made Google to shift its focus from desktop to mobile, thereby announcing that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches w.e.f July, 2018.
(Percentage of mobile device website traffic worldwide from 1st quarter 2015 to 3rd quarter 2017
https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/ )
A Sneak-Peak into New Update
The pages that present the slowest experience to the users are on target with this update of Google.
- Without any partiality with any of the technology used to develop the page, “Speed Update” will apply same standard to all the pages.
- Google has not presented any new tool to determine whether your page is affected by new algorithm or not. But they have a piece of advice for everyone:
“We encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”
- Google again mentioned in an indirect way that content will always be the king by mentioning that a slow page may rank high, if it has great, relevant content.
What Was the Need for an Update?
Have you ever experienced the loss of your favorite seats for watching movie because of slow upload of the page at checkout? A consumer always expects a fast mobile experience. For all the industry sectors, marketers need to focus on developing fast web experiences for the customer.
Page Speed= Revenue
As per Google, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop, despite the fact that more than half of the overall web traffic comes from mobile. 53% of users will skip your site after three seconds if it does not meet the user’s expectation of page to load in two seconds
The power of speed is so strong that it affected even the Obama’s fundraising campaign. An additional amount of $34 million was raised during Obama’s fundraising campaign of 2011 Presidential Elections when the Obama for America website shrunk page load time from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.
The Reason Behind the Slow Speed of Your Web page
a) Large-Sized Images are not speed-friendly
The colorful website do attracts the user but when compared to text, images and fancy graphics take long time to download. Images boost the visual appearance of the website so its usage should be done carefully.
Avoid sending big images to small screens by going ahead with most efficient image format and compression settings.
b) Overloaded Hosting
In this extremely fast-paced world, a user will not wait for even few seconds on the web and will move to your competitor’s website since internet is personifying speed and convenience. A visitor these days has several choices.
Your business website gets slow down using overloaded hosting solutions, thereby affecting your business. Web hosts that host thousand of websites at single instance of bloated apache servers claiming to be cost effective should be avoided.
c) High number of requests
Network latency is a real problem on mobile and higher number of requests required to render a page slows down the page. So, limit the number of components (images, style-sheets, JavaScript files, etc) a web page has to download.
Google has provided with the list of rules in this ‘Race against the Time.’ Make your webpage run as fast as possible to bag the first position in this highly competitive race.