Google has been known to, from time to time, improve the way in which their search engine features work. That has been a major concern for bloggers, businesses with presence online, and anyone in the business of SEO as most times, they are usually on the receiving end of these changes. Some even go as far as recording massive plunges in visits and revenue after Google announces a major change. Now, it seems the Alphabet-owned company will be rolling out a new feature to its search engine platform soon.
According to a statement from the company, Google will now use page load speed to rank some websites above others in searches. That means that the pages with a higher load speed will come out on top and slower pages will be relegated to the back. By so doing, Google aims to keep to its all-time promise of looking for new and innovative way to improve the customer’s experience.
It is true that before now, Google had rolled out this feature. However, it was limited to desktop versions of the search engine. With the new rollout, even the mobile users will get a piece of the action. Google has promised that it will only affect a small percentage of websites that have slow pages, and an even smaller number of queries from users.
Above all, Google will retain the criteria of great content, so much that a slow page will rank higher than a fast one on the grounds of being the most relevant to the query received.
In an online post, Google said
WE encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”
Although there is no way to know if a page will be affected by this new feature or not, but the load speed of a website page can be estimated by using tools such as Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse and PageSpeed.