In 2010, Google announced that page speed was a factor in determining both organic rankings on desktops, and AdWords quality score. Fast forward to 2018, Google has announced that page speed will become a major ranking factor for mobile searches results. This update will go live in July 2018 which provides you with time to prepare your website.
If you’re advertising on mobile devices or have an organic search presence of any kind, we recommend you pay close attention.
Since the update was announced, Google has been adamant on informing user that only pages that “deliver the slowest experience to visitors” will be impacted by the update. In addition, how Google indexes your mobile or desktop content will not be affected by the update. This speed update is expected to only impact how mobile pages are ranked in Google’s mobile search results.
Are you wondering if your website is going to take a hit? Well, MoreVisibility recommends that review your website’s mobile speed performance by utilizing tools, like Lighthouse and TestMySite. Tools like these measure your webpages’ current speed via a 3G and 4G connection and help identify areas where you can improve your mobile page load times.
Since these tools do not require you have administrative access to the website, you can run them on any site you’d like. Consider benchmarking your website against your competitors as a test. This will allow you to determine if your website could experience a rankings drop.
If you have any questions about how this update may affect your business, reach out to the experts at MoreVisibility for assistance.