Google have been factoring page speed into their search engine algorithms for the past five years. During this time Google has released a wealth of tools to help website owners speed up their sites.
More recently, some have noticed Google experimenting with “slow labels”. These are badges added to search results for websites that are deemed to have poor performance on a regular basis.
Google haven’t yet released any information about this feature. We suspect it is in early testing trails. This method is similar to the introduction of mobile friendly tags. Mobile optimised websites have since become a major ranking consideration for mobile searches.
What does this mean for the future?
Suffice to say a fast and mobile friendly website has never been more important. This is further evidence that Google is considering performance for ranking positions of websites. Over the coming weeks we’ll be releasing a series of posts on how you can improve the speed of your website.
Google has announced from 21st April websites with mobile friendly content will benefit from improved rankings on mobile searches. More information is available on our earlier post, Google favours mobile friendly websites.