Google recently announced that websites that load slow on mobile devices will now get penalised.
Don’t stress too much, you still have about 5 months to get yours up to speed (no pun intended).
Here is what Google actually said:
Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.
Is your website mobile friendly?
Before you check whether or not your website loads fast on the mobile, you first need to test if your website is actually mobile-friendly.
It still puzzles us when we see business owners spend money on SEO or Google AdWords, but their website is not optimised for all devices. Or it’s optimised, but it’s done poorly and the website either breaks or does not load correctly.
Not sure if your website is actually mobile optimised? Google offers a test for that, obviously.
Regardless if your website is mobile friendly or not, it’s the speed of it that’s in question here. Google ranking will be affected if your website loads slow. It could be a simple as a change in your hosting provider that could fix the issue.
My website is going to be penalised?
So what does it actually mean, “penalised”? Basically, we are talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If Google search ranking is important to you, then you should pay attention to this. You might be already spending a lot on SEO, but now your efforts may not bring the desired results they did in the past.
Take a look at your website, get your developers to check if there are any plugins, images or widgets that are slowing it down.
Unfortunately, there is no tool (according to Google) to check the speed of your actual mobile website (yet), but Google does have a few things that they suggest.
Here is one test for your website that you can do.