Google has announced a major change in how it ranks Websites for mobile searches. The search engine said it will now take page speed into consideration as one of its signals, the company says. The change, which Google is referring to as the “Speed Update,” will go into effect in July 2018, and will down rank very slow Sites under certain conditions.
Google says the update will only affect pages that “deliver the slowest experience to users” & it will only affect a small percentage of queries.
The post said:
We encourage developers to think broadly how about performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics. Although there is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor, here are some resources that can be used to evaluate a page’s performance.
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Chrome User Experience Report, a public dataset of key user experience metrics for popular destinations on the web, as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions
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Lighthouse, an automated tool and a part of Chrome Developer Tools for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility, and more) of web pages
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PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimizations