Speed and mobile site positioning in the Google search engine
What the SEO world and Google itself, led by Gary Illyes, have been saying for a long time has come to pass. Loading speed will finally be a ranking factor in Google's mobile search results! Loading speed will impact mobile website positioning!
In a short blog post published on January 17, 2018, Google announced a new ranking algorithm for mobile search results. It's scheduled to launch in July of this year. Called the "Speed Update," it will only impact a small percentage of search queries. Only mobile-friendly sites with the slowest loading speeds will be affected. While mobile site speed will be a factor in search results ranking, the change isn't as drastic as it might seem. There will be situations where slow sites will still rank highly, for example, when they have the most relevant content related to the search query.
More attentive readers may notice an interesting sentence in the blog post – the sentence stating that "Speed Update applies the same grading standard to all websites, regardless of the technology they were created in." It seems that these few words refer to the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology. Google has recently been heavily promoting this type of technology in mobile search results and simultaneously encouraging webmasters to implement it on their websites . In this way, Google is making it clear that the lack of AMP does not result in lower rankings in the SERPs.
You can learn more about AMP technology in the article "What are Accelerated Mobile Pages ?" published on our blog.
(The rest of the article can be found below the form)
Speed Update, what do we know about it and how will it affect website positioning?
The new ranking factor is specifically designed to lower search rankings for truly slow mobile sites. Only these sites will be affected by this update. To be clear, the new update isn't designed to reward fast sites, but to penalize very slow ones. The Speed Update will launch in July 2018. Google is giving website owners approximately six months to ensure their mobile sites aren't negatively impacted by the latest update.
Google also confirmed that Speed Update is another factor in its search algorithm, along with hundreds of other factors. The update will be fully automatic, and website owners will not receive any notification as to whether their pages meet Google's standards or not.
So how do we know when a site is very slow in Google's eyes? A partial answer to this question can be found in a statement by John Mueller from 2017. He claimed that sites that load in over 30 seconds can be considered very slow by Google. Of course, these words don't necessarily have to, and in fact, from a logical perspective, shouldn't even apply to the July update. Who waits more than 30 seconds for a page to load these days? 🙂
Why will loading speed be important when positioning a website?
What is Google's rationale for introducing this new factor that will impact website rankings ? People using mobile devices want to find answers to their questions as quickly as possible, and website speed is crucial in this regard. This announcement is far from breaking news. Back in 2016, Google specialist Gary Illyes confirmed that the next update to the mobile algorithm would use page speed as a ranking factor.
Let's go back in time. In 2010, Google introduced a new ranking factor: page load speed on desktop devices. Eight years later, history proves it repeats itself. This time, a very similar update will affect mobile sites. With technological advancements and a period in which mobile devices are catching up, or rather, overtaking, computers in terms of usage, we are witnessing the "mobile era." Last year, according to a Gemius study, more websites were accessed from mobile devices than from computers on the Polish internet. Moreover, over the past four years, the number of page views from mobile devices has increased more than sevenfold!
Looking at the above statistics, it seems logical why Google is choosing to move towards mobile. The Speed Update, and the mobile-first index announced in 2016 and currently in the testing phase, only confirm this trend.
Will my website be affected by the algorithm changes?
Wondering if your website will suffer after the Speed Update? Fortunately, there are many online tools that allow you to check your website's speed, its strengths and weaknesses, and see what needs improvement. One such tool is Google's TestMySite. It tests your website's loading speed using a 3G connection.
Another tool is PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google. Until recently, it was used solely to test website speed optimization, but now it also displays real-world site speed data. It's also the first tool Google recommends in its blog post.
Unfortunately for many website owners, the page speed metric only works for very large sites that generate significant traffic. Google explains this shortcoming as follows:
PageSpeed Insights uses data from the Chrome User Experience Report, which provides speed data for popular URLs that are well-known to Google's crawlers. If speed data for a given URL isn't available, we recommend using Lighthouse and running a synthetic performance audit to estimate your page speed and see optimization recommendations.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- the impact of the loading speed of the mobile version of the website on positioning in Google search results,
- Speed Update operation,
- the importance of website performance in the mobile era and the direction of Google algorithm development,
- ways to check your website performance and identify areas for optimization.
