Google recently announced that beginning July 2018, the loading speed of your website on mobile will affect how Google will rank it.
Basically, if your website takes too long to load on a mobile device, Google will ignore it and bring up the website — which loads faster — that matches the searcher’s query.
The good thing is that you have till July to fix your website. So, you ask…
How fast should my website load?
How’s instantly — 1 second — sound? People today don’t want to wait for anything — especially on a mobile device. Face it, we live in an instant gratification society and Google’s goal is to satisfy the searcher. Why? Because it’s the searcher that clicks on the ads that bring them income.
A page that takes five seconds to load is 90% more likely to suffer from bounce backs, compared to a page that loads in just one second. (WordStream)
A “bounce” happens when a visitor to your site clicks on a link to your site then leaves within seconds. It usually happens if the site takes too long to load. Google Analytics gives you a “bounce rate”. A bounce rate higher than 50% is bad. That means you’re losing more than 50% of the visitors to your site.
How can I make my website load faster and beat Google’s Mobile Speed Trap?
Well, first, use one of these free tools to test your load speed.
Now, you’re going to see a lot of technical jargon. Don’t even try to understand it.
Here are 3 of the main factors that may be causing your site to load slow:
- Too much code in the background. This is a major issue with those easy, drag-and-drop website builders. So all those fancy boxes will load nicely, it takes the browser some time to decipher all the code.
- Your picture files are too big.
- Your site is hosted on a cheap, shared-hosting platform.
And these are just 3! Most all of the others are really too technical to get into.
However, no worries! That’s where the folks at Sonfisher Web Studios can help you out. If you used one of the website speed tests listed and got a bad result, contact Kerry and he’ll be happy to analyze your website and see what can be done so that Google won’t punish you for being too slow.
Don’t wait till July! Do this now!
This post originally appeared on the Sonfisher Web Studios Blog.
