Google has always been in the business of providing their users the most relevant results, and as a website owner, your #1 priority should be providing unique and valuable content to your users. However, your #2 priority needs to be the user experience, more specifically the user experience on a mobile device.
Google continues to emphasize the importance of a mobile friendly website. Aligning with this emphasis, Google has recently announced their latest algorithm update called the "Speed Update." The Speed Update will use page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches. The goal of this update is to offer mobile users a better experience while browsing, which will lead to move valuable interactions for website owners; after all, the probability of a bounce (a customer leaving your site without any interaction), increases substantially as the load the time of a page increases.
So, what can you do about it?
Although there isn't a resource that can definitively determine whether or not your site will be affected, Google has provided us with these useful resources to check if they consider your site "mobile friendly" and how the speed of your site compares to your industry average.
You may also want to consider implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP pages prioritize a faster experience for users by utilizing various technical approaches to insure that a page will load its content almost instantaneously. As of February 2016, Google began to prioritize AMP sites in Google Mobile Search results.
This Speed Update is excepted to go into effect July 2018, giving website owners approximately 5 months to prepare. If you have questions about this update or would like to learn more about the options that you have to increase the speed of your site, contact us.
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