The Speed Update Is Live

What starts today

In January, Google said page speed would become a ranking factor for searches made on phones from July. Today it confirmed that the Speed Update is rolling out for all users.

Speed has counted in desktop rankings since 2010. What changes now is that a slow page can lose ground in searches made on phones, the devices that now carry more than half of all web traffic.

The January announcement was careful about scope, and it is worth reading closely before anybody panics.

Who it affects

Google said the update would only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users, and only a small share of searches.

It applies the same standard to every page, whatever technology was used to build it. No particular framework or format earns an exemption.

And the intent of the search remains a very strong signal. A slow page with the best answer to a question can still rank well; a fast page with a poor answer will not rank because it is fast.

For most small business sites, today will look like any other day. The ones with work to do are slow by any standard, not slightly slower than a competitor.

Signs a page may be among the slowest

• A blank screen for several seconds on a phone before anything appears.
• A home page weighing several megabytes in total.
• Photographs uploaded just as the camera or phone saved them.
• A slider, video or social feed above the first heading.
• A long wait before the server sends anything at all.
• Old hosting that has not been reviewed in years.

The fifth is the one an owner cannot fix by editing the page. If the server takes several seconds to start responding, nothing on the page can begin until it does, however light the page is.

There is no direct test

Google said in January that no tool would directly indicate whether a page is affected. What you can do is measure, and look for pages that are clearly slow.

PageSpeed Insights gives each page a speed rating based on real visits from Chrome users where there is enough data, plus a list of suggested fixes. A small site will often lack the visit data and get only the suggestions.

The site speed section of Google Analytics shows load times by page, from a sample of visits. It is rough, but it shows which pages are consistently the worst.

Check the pages people arrive at from search, not just the home page; a service page with a huge gallery can be the slowest on the site.

Testing like a customer

Numbers help, but the test that matters is the one your customers run without meaning to.

Take a phone away from the office Wi-Fi, onto mobile data. Open a private tab, search for one of your services, and tap your own result.

Count how long it takes before you can read the first heading and tap the phone number. Then do the same on the oldest phone anybody in the business owns.

If either test leaves you waiting long enough to wonder whether the page is working, so does everybody else.

A worked example

A party rental company supplying tents, tables and chairs had a home page built around a slider of twelve photographs, each uploaded at full camera size.

Below the slider sat an embedded social media feed, a chat widget from a trial nobody had ended, and three separate tracking scripts added by three different people.

The site ran on an old shared hosting plan with PHP 5.6, and the server took several seconds to respond before the page could start loading at all.

On a phone on mobile data, the first heading appeared after a long blank wait, and the phone number later still.

The fix came in three parts: one resized photograph instead of the slider; the feed, the unused widget and two duplicate tracking scripts removed; and a move to PHP 7 with page caching.

On the same phone, the heading and number now appear almost at once.

Images first

On most slow small business pages, images are the largest single cause.

A photograph straight from a phone can be several megabytes, many times what a page needs. Resized to the space it fills and saved at a sensible quality, it looks the same and weighs a small fraction as much.

Sliders multiply the problem, since every slide downloads whether anybody waits to see it or not. One good photograph does the job better.

The server's share

Before the browser can draw anything, the server has to respond. On an overloaded shared plan, or a site doing too much work for every visit, that alone can take seconds.

For WordPress sites, PHP 7 runs roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.6, which many hosting accounts still use.

Page caching, which keeps a ready-made copy of each page instead of building it for every visit, removes much of the remaining wait. Both are changes for whoever manages your hosting, and both help every page at once.

Scripts added for something else

Every chat widget, social feed, tracking tag and font adds requests the phone has to make before the page settles.

Most were added one at a time, for a reason, and few were ever removed: a trial that ended, a finished campaign, a tool nobody logs in to.

List what the site loads, ask who uses each one, and remove what nobody can defend.

The counter-case

A site that already loads in a few seconds on a phone has nothing to do today.

The update is aimed at the slowest pages, and shaving a fraction of a second from a page that is already reasonable will not move it in search. Relevance and reputation still decide most rankings.

Nor is speed worth buying with content. Stripping out the photographs and detail that persuade people, to win a better score, trades the visitor's reason to call for a number.

But a page that leaves people staring at a blank screen was losing them before today. Find your slowest pages and fix the images, the server and the scripts.

This week

1. Test your key pages on a phone on mobile data.
2. Run them through PageSpeed Insights.
3. Find the slowest pages in Analytics.
4. Resize and compress the largest images.
5. Ask your host about PHP 7 and caching.
6. Remove scripts nobody uses.
7. Test again on the same phone.

Step five is the easiest to overlook. Images can be fixed page by page, but a slow server holds back every page on the site, and the fix is often a setting rather than a rebuild.

Asking Google to look again at a page once it is fixed is covered in URL inspection in Search Console.

Frequently asked questions

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.