google update "mobile speed"

[devleadzaim]

hey, anyone guides me abt mobile speed google update and how it really affects my SEO

[nick0201]

Google introduced mobile speed as a ranking factor in the "Speed Update" back in July 2018. Basically, the update made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. This means that if your website is slow to load on mobile devices, it could affect your rankings in Google's mobile search results.

However, Google has stated that this update only impacts the slowest websites, and a slow page could still rank highly if its content is highly relevant to a user's search.

Since then, Google introduced a new ranking signal called Page Experience which includes Core Web Vitals in addition to mobile-friendliness assessments. This update debuted in May 2021 and means website owners should focus even more on delivering a great user experience on both mobile and desktop devices.

To ensure your website is optimized for this:

Measure: Use Google's PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or other tools that utilize Google's Core Web Vitals API to measure your website's speed and performance on mobile devices.

Optimize: Make sure your website is responsive, ensuring it loads properly on mobile devices of all shapes and sizes. Images and other elements of your site should resize properly. Optimize your images and code to ensure that they load quickly. Implement lazy loading, where certain elements aren't loaded until they're needed. Remove any unnecessary plugins which can slow down your site, particularly on mobile.

Monitor: Regularly check your website's mobile performance to ensure it continues to meet Google's standard.

Remember that while site speed is important, relevant and high-quality content is still crucial for SEO. You should focus on both providing great content and ensuring a fast, user-friendly experience, for the best SEO results.

Beyond technical measures, providing a fast and user-friendly mobile experience facilitates the user journey and can significantly improve engagement and conversions, which can indirectly positively influence your website's authority and ranking potential.


Let's break down the points further on optimizing mobile speed and its impact on SEO.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): Google indirectly encourages website owners to use their AMP project as it loads pages faster on mobile and can help get more visibility in features like the Top Stories carousel.

Responsive Design: This allows your website to reconfigure itself based on the screen size it's being viewed on. A responsive design not only enhances the user experience but is also favored by Google.

Minimize Code: Removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, or code can decrease your load time. This can be done with tasks like minifying CSS, JavaScript, and optimizing HTML.

Browser Caching: By implementing browser caching, you instruct browsers to hold onto certain files for a set period, which can improve load time for returning visitors.

Web Hosting: A good hosting provider is key in ensuring your website loads fast. Better hosting providers generally have more resources to allocate to their servers, leading to faster load times.

Content Distribution Network (CDN): A CDN can reduce bandwidth costs, increase content availability, and provide better performance by distributing your service spatially relative to end-users.

Eliminate Redirects: Each time a page redirects to another page, your visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.

Improve Server Response Time: Your server response time is affected by the amount of traffic you receive, the resources each page uses, the software your server uses, and the hosting solution you use.

Compression: Enable compression with tools like Gzip to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.

Prioritize Visible Content: If the amount of data required exceeds the initial congestion window (typically 14.6kB compressed), it will require additional round trips between your server and the user's browser. For users on networks with high latitudes, this can cause significant delays.

Leverage HTTP/2: If your server and users' browsers support it, using HTTP/2 can significantly speed up load times. It offers various improvements over HTTP/1.1 such as header compression, prioritization, and multiplexing.


You may want to consider some additional tools and techniques to help further improve your website's mobile speed and overall performance. Here are a few more advanced details:

Resource Hints: These are directives that allow developers to aid the browser in the decision-making process of which origins it should connect to, and which resources it should preload and prefetch.

Preconnect: This informs the browser that your page will soon connect to another domain, and that the browser should connect to it in the background.
DNS-prefetch: DNS-prefetch is a lower-priority alternative to preconnect, and is a good fallback for most other browsers as it's supported by all major ones.
Preload: Preload can be used to load key resources that are currently lazy-loaded or found inside a carousel, tab, or hidden view.
Improve Images: There are several ways you can optimize your images, and every little bit can help when it comes to your website's load speed.

Use next-gen formats: Image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP often provide better compression rates than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.
Use responsive images: This can help you deliver the smallest possible image to every device.
Load JavaScript Asynchronously: Loading scripts asynchronously can speed up your pages because when a browser loads a page, it moves from top to bottom. If it's in the middle of loading your HTML and it runs into a script, it stops to load that script before continuing.

Use a Service Worker: A service worker is a script that your browser runs in the background to manage caching for offline usage and content delivery.

Monitor Mobile Usability in Google Search Console: Google Search Console provides an entire report dedicated to mobile usability. It's perfect for highlighting areas where your mobile website might fall short of Google's SEO standards.

Avoid Interstitials or Pop-ups: Be careful with interstitials or pop-ups on your site, particularly as Google might start penalizing websites that make content less accessible to users.

[ritesh3592]

Seems like @op got the solution because there is no reply to the question asked by the forum member!!

[John - Smith]

what is your website's page speed score for mobile?

[Jeffscott]

We all know that mobile speed plays a vital role in sending good signals to Google so optimizing every mobile page in your website will be a good practice in staying your visitors.

[eSage IT]

Google has released a speed update due to a massive change in the market during the last few years. The majority of people have shifted to mobile browsing from the old traditional desktop browsing, therefor for google to stay on top of the search engine list, and it is necessary to give priority to those websites which perform well on mobile platforms. And mobile speed is one of the major factors to rank in the mobile search result.

[ThanhKim]

How fast my website need to get good impression from users? My website is have a high-required images quality so I can't optimize the speed under 7s/ load.