“There are 245 million internet users in the US, and if every one of them has to wait five seconds, we just wasted nearly 39 years of their time.”
– The Google Gospel of Speed – Google’s SVP of Infrastructure, Urs Hölzle (Jan 2012).
The assumption that ‘fast is better than slow’, says Hölzle, has been a Google mantra since the early days. With use of the internet growing exponentially, he says, speed isn’t just a feature, it’s the feature.
Studies have shown that users want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — people really care about the speed of a page. A Think With Google article from February 2018 found that as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, “the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%”.
So it makes perfect sense for Google to announce that, starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. The new technology is to be called, with impeccable logic, the Speed Update.
Google says that speed is still just “one of many signals that are used to rank pages” and “intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content”.It also says that the innovation will only impact a “small percentage of queries”. Well, with Google processing over 40 000 search queries every second, or nearly 4 billion a day (there’s a Live Stats page), a “small percentage” can still amount to a lot of websites.
The “relevant content” reference indicates that the search engine is making overall mobile user experience as well as speed the focus of this update. In other words, site owners who intend to move up the rankings need to focus on more than just the speed of their page.
It’s felt that the upcoming change in Google’s algorithms reflects a move towards the broader implementation of its AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) technology. But the Speed Update is applicable regardless of the page technology and – interestingly enough – regardless of any differences to the desktop page.This is about page performance in general and is aimed at offering mobile users a better overall experience. Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches back in 2015 (so says Think With Google). With mobile traffic now representing more than 50% of overall web traffic, delivering a positive user experience on all devices has to be of increasing importance.Google wants developers “to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics when improving their site”.
Since mobile page speed can be improved by avoiding unnecessary content (videos set to autoplay, for example) and implementing a simpler design, by aiming for speed, developers are also improving efficiency and, ideally, the user experience – two birds with one stone.
If this is what site owners bear in mind, the Speed Update algorithm need not be a hurdle to overcome, but rather a stepping-stone to improvements, both in page performance and in terms of mobile experience.