On January 17th Google announced a new ranking algorithm designed for mobile search. Google is calling it the “Speed Update,” and its likely to effect a small number of extremely slow loading mobile website. Google has stated that only pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” will be impacted by this update, the company says.
How to check your site is up to speed
The update is going live sometime in July 2018 so you have around 5 months to look into getting your developers to enhance your mobile loading capabilities.
You can read the full article here at Googles Webmaster Central Blog
You can test you speeds using a few tools here:
- Googles Page Speed Insights
- Think with Google Mobile tool
If your a bit more skilled you may want to use tools like the new Google LightHouse to measure page speed and make improvements or Webpagetest.org.
You can also see if your site is Mobile Friendly using this tool as well.
Wasn’t Page Speed always a Ranking factor?
We have know since 2010 that page speed was a ranking factor, but this was only on “desktop searches”. Google has been promising that i would look at mobile search for years now, and in July 2018 it will finally be here. It’s still unclear whether these ranking factors will also be applied to desktop searches, for that it seems we will have to wait on official word.
mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks-01-21
What about the Google mobile friendly update in 2015?
#MOBILEGEDDON
Remember in 2015, when you had to upgrade your website, or you were going to get penalized by Google, Shouldn’t of this all been fixed then?
This was a slightly different update, it was aimed at pushing people move there desktop only websites to perform on both desktop and mobile platforms and there was a major push for responsive or Mobile friendly designed websites by Google.
This however did not have anything to do with the load times, nor did Google use this as a ranking factor.
Many things have change in the last 3 years as you can imagine, and what was considered fast loading then, will likely not be the standard today. We have seen the addition of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) rolled out by Google to speed up mobile page, and this was a good indication that this change was only a matter of time.
To look at your best options moving forward you can contact our development team at ionline, to find the best solution for your current mobile website. So your all set for the July update.