When real users have a slow experience on mobile, they're much less likely to find what they are looking for or purchase from you in the future. For many sites this equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load.
Last week, Google Search and Ads teams announced two new speed initiatives to help improve user-experience on the web. Both efforts recommend that site owners and developers pay attention to user-centric performance metrics and use tools such as Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights, and real-world field data (e.g. see Chrome User Experience Report) to diagnose and improve user experiences.
Speed is now used as a ranking factor for mobile searches
Users want to find answers to their questions quickly and data shows that people really care about how quickly their pages load. The Search team announced speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010 and as of this month (July 2018), page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
If you're a developer working on a site, now is a good time to evaluate your performance using our speed tools. Think about how performance affects the user experience of your pages and consider measuring a variety of real-world user-centric performance metrics.
Are you shipping too much JavaScript? Too many images? Images and JavaScript are the most significant contributors to the page weight that affect page load time based on data from HTTP Archive and the Chrome User Experience Report - our public dataset for key UX metrics as experienced by Chrome users under real-world conditions.
To evaluate performance, check:
