That’s true. A few days ago, Google let it be known that its primary focus for indexing a Site will rely on just how ‘Mobile-Friendly’ the Site is. This means that page-load speed is the most important factor to consider if you want to feature in Google’s search results.
Optimum load-time is set at a blazing 2 seconds, & that’s pretty quick! Google maintains that anything slower than a 2 second page-load, sees potential user rates drop by more than 26% per second. So developers now have to ensure a Google mobile friendly Site.
It’s important to note that there isn’t a separate mobile-first index; Google Search continues to use only one index. Google Search continues to show the URL that is the most appropriate to users (whether it’s a desktop or mobile URL) in Search results. – Google
You may test your Site here.
Critical load-time issues are generally influenced by ’heavy’ media assets such as, CSS documents, Javascript plugins or libraries & images.
Fortunately, these problems have solutions. There are a few ’fixes’ developers can implement to overcome the issues.
Let’s take a look at what can be done to improve page-load speed:
Minification
Several tools exist to minify Javascript & CSS, such as Minifier. Take advantage of these tools to improve your Site’s speed.
Compression
Reducing the size & quality of an image can go a long way to optimizing speed. There are services which can be used to effect this process, such as Kraken which offers image optimization functionality in a variety of methods. The service has a multi-functional approach, starting at low monthly fees, & promises to reduce entire directories of images at a time. Their API, however, is entirely free to use, which means that developers are well catered for.
CND
Googling ’CND services’ will result in a host of links. These services offer a very effective method for reducing page-load speeds, since the resource is served from the closest machine possible.
If, for instance, the original server is in South Africa, but the client accessing the page resides in France, then instead of the media asset traveling between continents, it is served from the closest PoPs point (Points of Presence). With massive savings on both resources & speed, this method is regarded as one of the best contenders in the race toward optimization. Many services offer generous free plans, which further enhance this option— Cloudinary operates a CND service. It offers a free plan with support for 300,000 images or videos, with 20,000 transformations, & 50G space.
Gzip
Zipping Web Content is an effective space saving & speed enhancing technique. If your host supports this method for saving & serving files, the option allows resources, which have been compressed to be output at original size, without any loss in clarity during saving.
Scale
Use a tool or software program, which may be uploaded to your Website to handle size & quality re-sampling. Googling ’image reduction software based on device’, will output thousands of results. Effectively, these managers only reduce the size of the image temporarily, based on the screen-size of the device viewing the page, which gives each user an optimized experience.
Google has set-up a testing facility, TestMySite so that Site owners can measure the effectiveness of efforts at reduction. The tool not only gives exact page-load speeds, it also suggests fixes & displays a percentage figure which estimates user loss as a result of poor speed management.
Image Credit: Google
