Google has announced that July 2018 onwards PageSpeed tool will be used as a factor to rank pages in mobile search. Since 2010, speed is a factor that determines page rankings for desktop searches.
However, now it will be extended to mobile searches, as well.
This “Speed Update” will only target the pages that render the slowest loading experience to the users, as of now. This means, whether the page is affected by this algorithm update or not, wouldn’t be easy to determine.
However, Google also made it clear that “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Here are some tools that will be still useful to evaluate and analyze a page’s performance:
- Chrome User Experience Report
- Lighthouse
- PageSpeed Insights
