Google announced that, starting from July 2018, Page Speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Why does Google care about Page Speed?
How much does Web Performance impact Search Engine Rankings?
The Speed Update to Google’s algorithm next July 2018
Don’t hit the panic button yet, check your site first

Why does Google care about Page Speed?

When business owners and marketers think of SEO, they think of it as a series of tasks they have to perform so to be liked and ranked by Google (and other search engines).

What is usually missing is a good understanding of why certain best practices and rules need to be followed. Why does Google care?

Well, it's pretty simple business thinking: Google's main product is its Search Engine, which sole goal is to provide people with relevant, useful answer to their queries. What would happen if all of a sudden the results you'd get by searching on Google were vastly superior and always offer you a quality experience? Simple. Users will fall in love with Google even more and leave its competitors (mainly Bing) for good!

Google cares about the experience their users get. And if you understand this, you’d also agree that page speed and fluidity are fundamental factors when it comes to User Experience.

Think about how you search on the Web. How often do you close a tab and go to the next search result if a site takes too long to load? As you scroll through recipes on your phone while buying groceries, how likely it is that you’ll return to that site that always takes forever to give you the content you are looking for?

Page speed is absolutely critical for websites. And Google knows it.

How much does Web Performance impact Search Engine Rankings?

So, we established that speed is an important aspect of any website, and that it has an impact on SEO. But how impactful would that be?

Here’s the thing. Search engines use an incredible amount of signals and information about your site in order to decide how relevant it is to the user’s search keyword. Among others, you’ll find the architecture of the site, its accessibility, its mobile-friendliness, and so on. And then there’s page speed.

However, the performance of your site doesn’t just affect SEO directly. There is also an indirect effect: in fact, other metrics will be impacted, which in turn will signal to Google that your site is of good quality. Let’s see some.

Page Views and Time Spent On Site: visitors who like the experience of browsing through your website will view more pages and spend more time on your website. This tells Google that your site is relevant to the visitors and it will rank you higher.

Bounce Rate: visitors who enjoy your site will less likely bounce back to Google’s search results. And Google loves sites with low bounce rates.

Crawl budget: a fast site allows Google to crawl more pages during their allocated crawl budget. Google’s crawlers like to save resources and will likely come back more often to check for updates or index more pages.

The Speed Update to Google’s algorithm next July 2018

In the past, Google asserted that page speed was a Ranking factor for some subset of searches. A few years have past since that announcement, and Google is going all about web performance.

In fact, Google announced that, starting from July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. The company is calling it the “Speed Update” and will have the greatest impact on those pages that deliver a slow experience.

In addition to this, in the last couple of years they've been busy making sure sites get faster and faster every day:

They made slight adjustments to their algorithms, in order to reward faster sites with a better positioning in search results
They've been publishing articles and studies, in order to sensitize developers and management all over the world about this performance revolution that is occurring
They invested in a new technology, called AMP, that should help developers build faster sites (you will recognize AMP pages: they're the ones that come with a small thunder icon in the search results). Great results have already been registered.

Don’t hit the panic button yet, check your site first

So how do you know if your site is going to be affected by this upcoming update? Is your site offering a slow experience?

The first thing you should do would be measuring the performance of your website. There are various tools at your disposal, but the most simple check you can do is by using Google PageSpeed and Google’s Test My Site.

If you’re looking for a benchmark, here it is: users expect pages to load in 2 seconds, and after 3 seconds up to 53% of users will abandon your site.

Are you ready to adjust your SEO strategy and skyrocket your website speed? Hit me up for a quick call and I'll be happy to help!