“Time is the new currency. Our customers want to live their lives. Technology has changed their expectations, and we knew we needed to change our approach to service and marketing in order to meet those.”
—Brian Benstock, general manager and VP at Paragon Honda
It’s 2018 and if your web page takes more than 10 seconds to load, then you are far behind! Nobody likes to wait for minutes just for your page to load — they will simply hit the back button. According to a study, 53% of the users will abandon the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load! So it came as no surprise when Google announced that site speed will be a ranking factor in the mobile search results from July 2018.
However, Google assured that only a small percentage of the sites will be affected by it since the majority of the site loads faster than 10 seconds. Also, there will be exceptions to websites which provide relevant and high-quality content to users. Those websites can still rank well in the search engine result pages because the intent of the search query is still a strong factor.
If you are not sure about your site’s speed, you can use the Google’s “PageSpeed Tool”. This tool uses a standard 3G connection to replicate what most people are using to surf the web using mobile devices. It not only tells you about your site speed but also gives suggestions on how you can improve your website’s load time.
What About AMP? Google’s announcement stated that it “applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page”, which means AMP gets no special advantage except that by its very nature it will pass all of these speed standards with flying colors. However, that doesn’t mean that you get an automatic pass. If you’re using AMP you still need to be sure that everything is set up properly.
If you need any help with mobile optimization, we can assist. Just reach out to us and we will be able to assist you further.