Google’s Speed Update to Improve Load Time For All Users
Let’s be brutally honest, slow loading webpages either on a desktop or mobile device are the bane of our existence! Saavy companies should be concerned with the load time of their webpages, but the truth is many business don’t have the budget to dedicate solely for SEO or site tune ups. That is to their detriment, really.
Luckily, Google’s latest “Speed Update” algorithm won’t cost them a dime, but it will increase the speed for both mobile and desktop searches for the slowest pages out there.
What’s the Skinny on This Speed Update for Mobile Searches?
Here’s the latest dope on Google’s newest Speed Update algorithm that began helping slow loading pages on July 9th:
- Google’s speed update will only affect the slowest pages and only a “small percentage of queries.”1
- Originally, the speed update was intended to only affect mobile searches, but in early July Google announced the rollout would be universal for all users.
- Only a three second load-time can improve bounce rates by 32%, while a five-second load time can increase bounce rates by as much as 90%, according to Google. (Note: Each bounce represents a potential client lost.)
- Indirectly, the speed update by virtue of bounce rate can impact organic search rankings.
- In 2010, Google declared that bounces were negative results of user experiences, and even included site speed as a ranking factor.
How Will Google’s Speed Update Impact You?
The following information was also supplied by Google’s webmasters on their blog:
- To be precise, the speed update will only impact “pages that deliver the slowest experience to users.”
- Even though indirectly improved bounce rates can help ranking in the long run, Google cautions folks not to expect improved rankings, because any time shaved off to improve load time would be mere milliseconds.
- So, what pages will be impacted? Well, SEO gurus point to the PageSpeed Insights tool, which considers a page taking three seconds to load or longer to be slow. Here are a couple of other fine page performance tools to measure your website’s speed load time and other metrics:
- Lighthouse – this tool can b,e used to test speed, performance, accessibility, and other factors.
- Chrome User Experience Report – as the name would suggest, this tool tests user experience metrics.
If you are not technically inclined to enhance your website for SEO or perform other tune-up capabilities, let the experts at Epic Web Results do it for you. We offer several affordable packages, and even allow our clients to select only the modules they care to incorporate into a package.
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1“Using Page Speed in Mobile Search Ranking” published in Google Blog, Jan. 2018.
