More on Mobile Page Speed: Google Tools Reiterates Its Importance To Businesses

February 28, 2018

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Google could not be any clearer in their focus to encouraging site owners and digital marketer to improve their mobile website performance.

Just last month they have announced that they will be considering page speed as a ranking factor in mobile SERP starting July 2018. This is for the purpose of providing users with answers to their queries in a fast manner.

Here are some industry benchmarks as the basis for the “speed update”.

The Bad

53% of mobile site visitors will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
On average, it takes 15 seconds to fully load a website.
Speed equals revenue; mobile conversion rates are lower than that of the desktop.
Majority of mobile sites are slow with too many elements.
Automotive, retail and technology related mobile sites take the longest to load.
70% of mobile websites surveyed take more than 5 seconds to load visual content above the fold and more than 7 seconds to fully load visuals below and above the fold.
As a page load takes longer from 1-10 seconds, bounce rate may increase by 123%.
As more elements (from 400-6000) are used in a mobile website, the conversion may drop by 95%.

The Ugly

79% of pages surveyed were over 1MB.
53% pages were over 2MB.
23% pages were over 4MB.

The Good

Image and text compression can save 250KB to 25% of pages.
Image and text compression can save 1MB to 10% of pages.
Mobile sites in retail, travel, and healthcare sectors showed improvements.

However, the search engine giant also made it clear that page speed will just be a minor ranking factor. It could only affect a small percentage of queries and will only affect pages which are very slow.

Google still put more importance on website’s intent and content quality. Yet, it is not enough to bail yourself on improving your website speed. In fact, this might be the right time for you improve your mobile page speed.

New Google Tools For Mobile Page Speed

As Google put more emphasis on mobile page speed of websites, they also launched some new benchmarking tools which will help you understand how important mobile page speed is for your website.

The Mobile Scorecard

This Mobile Scorecard can compare the speed of several mobile websites using Chrome User Experience Report data. With this new tool, you can compare your website and see where it stacks up in the mobile page speed competition.

Ideally, your mobile website should fully load within 3 seconds in 4G and within 5 seconds in 3G to avoid bounced website visits.

In this new tool, you can compare different mobile websites from 12 different countries. You can also choose a connection whether in 3G or 4G.

The Impact Calculator

The Impact Calculator allows you to view the monetary impact of your mobile loading speed. This tool is based on benchmarking data and it automatically fetches your site speed info from the Mobile Scorecard. Take a look at how it works.

By placing some additional information like your average monthly visitors, average order value and conversion rate, the calculator can measure your potential annual revenue impact.

Meeting Users’ Expectation

Consumers expect more from businesses. In searching the web, they expect better and faster digital experience. With mobile searching on the rise, Google wants to encourage marketers and site owners to enhance their mobile website experience.

In short, Google wants to help. In order for businesses to enjoy the benefit brought by the growing mobile traffic, mobile websites should be optimized in a page-by-page level.

The search engine giant shows no sign of stopping in their campaign in getting marketers and website owners to improve the website overall web performance.

This isn’t surprising. Google has a lot of plans for mobile. Expect Google to introduce more updates and tools for mobile websites. The impending mobile-first index update is something you should also prepare for.

Sooner or later, search engine optimization for mobile will no longer be just an option but a requirement. If you want your websites to gain visibility in SERP and increase traffic, you have to enforce good mobile optimization practices on our website.

At the end of the day, you have no choice but to follow the path that your users have taken. And that is to the world of mobile searching.