Google will Start Considering Page Speed as a Factor for Mobile Search Ranking

Google has certain predefined factors which were taken into consideration by the Google for Mobile Search Ranking. Now Google has added one more factor to the list named as “Page Speed”. Speed has been one of the factors in previous years but the signal of it was focused and considered only for Desktop Searches. Google will be announcing and launching its new factor in July 2018 and since then Page Speed will be the part of the group of ranking factors for mobile searches. As a result of this, the websites which are very slow and takes a lot of time in loading will not be ranked well by Google.

Though Speed will be one of the factors for mobile search ranking but it will not be the only factor. There will be pages with slow speed getting high ranks and that will be made possible only in the case when the content of the site is most relevant as per the search query. The Speed Update is said to affect only those pages that offers with slow experience and will not affect major portion of their queries.

Google has always encouraged the developers and have made them think and explore on how the performance can affect user’s experience of their page accompanied with many other user experience metrics. Google has worked hard to introduce Page Speed as a factor for mobile search ranking and has been prioritizing the page speed for some time.

Google has also rolled out its newly developed mobile first search index to some of the selected sites. The major objective behind doing all this was to shift the overall search index in the favour of the mobile version of the website over the desktop version. The case today is that, the information on mobile site differs from that in desktop site. To ensure similar information on both mobile and desktop site Google introduced this change which will ultimately force web publishers to lay their focus equally on both mobile and desktop site.

Speed Update does not relate much to the information on both the sites, it is more focused on how well the page performs in general not only on desktop but also on the mobile phones, so as to give mobile users best experience overall.

Google did not offer any direct Google Page Speed Tool to help developers check if their page is getting affected by this new ranking factor, but there are some resources which can help them in evaluating their page’s performance.

1. Chrome User Experience Report is the public dataset of the key user experience metric for some of the very popular destinations on the web. This has been tested and experienced by the Chrome under real world conditions.
2. Page Speed insights is a tool that helps us in determining the performance of the page on Chrome UX Report and after completion of the evaluation it gives a report with some suggestions on optimizations.
3. Lighthouse is an automated tool and a part of the Chrome Developer Tool. It is used for auditing the quality of the web pages.

Mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches in past few years, considering this Google has not started giving much importance to the mobile searches over the desktop searches. In compliance to this Google introduced its new factor of Page Speed.