Google Will Use Speed in Mobile Rankings From July

What Google announced

Google said yesterday that from July, how fast a page loads will count in how it ranks when somebody searches on a phone.

Speed has counted in desktop rankings for years. This extends it to mobile, which is now where more than half of all web browsing happens.

Google is calling it the Speed Update, and its description was measured. It will affect only the pages that deliver the slowest experience, and only a small share of searches.

The intent behind a search still counts for a great deal, it said, so a slow page with the best answer can still rank well.

Aimed at the slowest, not the fastest

The wording matters. This is about demoting pages that are painfully slow, not rewarding pages that shave off another tenth of a second.

The same standard applies whatever the page is built with. No special format is required, including AMP, the fast-loading page format Google has promoted for mobile.

Google also said no tool tells you directly whether a page is affected. The tools that exist measure speed, which is a different question.

So the useful question is not whether you will be penalised in July, but whether any of your important pages are slow enough to be in the group this targets.

The sites most likely to be affected

• Photographs straight from a camera, several megabytes each, shrunk only on screen.
• A home page slider loading five large images at once.
• Background video playing behind the main heading.
• Dozens of plugins, each adding its own scripts and styles.
• Embedded feeds and maps repeated on every page.
• Crowded, cheap hosting that takes seconds to start answering.

The first is the cheapest to fix. A photograph resized to the width it is shown at, and saved at sensible quality, is a fraction of the size, and nobody can see the difference.

The sites that can relax

A site that appears within a few seconds on a phone, over an ordinary mobile connection, is very unlikely to be what Google means by the slowest.

Nor does a perfect score matter. Testing tools grade a list of suggestions, not rankings, and the last few points rarely change anything a visitor would notice.

And a page that ranks because it answers the search well will not lose that over a modest delay. Relevance still comes first.

How to tell whether yours is slow

Start with an actual phone, on its own data connection rather than the office network, in a private tab so nothing is already stored. Count the seconds until you can read the page and use it.

Then run the same pages through PageSpeed Insights. This month it began showing, alongside its suggestions, how quickly the page has loaded for real Chrome users, where Google has enough data.

Many small business sites do not have enough visitors for that part, and the tool says so. The suggestions are still worth reading, especially those about image sizes.

Total page weight is the other simple measure: a page asking a phone for several megabytes is worth a closer look.

The pages to fix first

The pages that count here are the ones people reach from a search on a phone.

In the new Search Console, the Performance report can be filtered to mobile, showing which of your pages appear and get clicked. Analytics shows the same from the other side, as landing pages for visitors on phones.

For most small businesses the list is short: the home page, the main service pages, perhaps a location page and the contact page.

Fix those first. The blog post from 2014 with the oversized header image can wait its turn.

A worked example

A company that builds sunrooms and patio covers had a home page that loaded reasonably well. The owner checked it on his phone now and then, and it seemed fine.

The pages phone searchers actually reached were different: one for each product, such as patio covers, sunrooms and glass railings, found through searches naming the product and the town.

Each of those pages carried a gallery of forty photographs at full camera size, all loading at once, and an embedded video tour. On mobile data, each one asked the phone for many megabytes before it settled.

The galleries were cut to six resized photographs per page, with the rest a tap away, and the video became a still image with a link. The home page was left alone.

Finding those pages took ten minutes in Search Console. Fixing them took an afternoon, and nothing about their content changed.

What not to do

Announcements like this bring out sellers, and some of the advice will be expensive.

Do not rebuild a site in a panic over a change that affects only the slowest pages. Measure first.

Do not pile speed plugins on top of a slow site. Each adds its own code, and two caching plugins together can break pages in ways that are hard to trace.

And do not strip out the content that answers the search to save a few kilobytes. That content is the reason the page ranks at all.

The server matters too

Some slowness happens before a single image is sent: the time the server takes to start answering.

Crowded shared hosting, a missing cache and an outdated PHP version all add to that wait. A WordPress site still on PHP 5.6 can usually gain a good deal simply by moving to PHP 7, which is considerably faster.

That is a conversation with your host or whoever maintains the site, and often one of the cheapest improvements available.

The counter-case

For many sites, July will pass unnoticed.

A site that already loads quickly on a phone has nothing to fix for this update, and a business whose customers mostly search from a desk at work will feel little of it.

Speed is one signal among a great many, and a page that answers a search better than anything else will usually keep its place.

Even so, test the pages phone searchers reach and fix the heaviest first, because a visitor waiting on a slow page is a cost today, not only from July.

Before July

1. Load your home page on a phone over mobile data.
2. Run your main pages through PageSpeed Insights.
3. Find the pages phone searchers land on.
4. Resize the largest photographs on those pages first.
5. Remove plugins nobody can explain.
6. Raise PHP 7 and caching with your host.
7. Test again after each change.

Step three is the one that saves the most effort, because it points the work at the handful of pages this change can affect rather than at the whole site.

The report that shows which pages phone searchers reach is covered in the new Search Console has arrived.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.