Next month, page speed begins to count in Google's mobile rankings. Google announced the change in January and named it the Speed Update. It is scheduled for July.
Speed has been a factor in desktop rankings since 2010. The impact is greater on mobile, however, because that is where people now look up businesses: on a phone, with an average connection, in a parking lot or while waiting for a ferry. Many small business sites load poorly on a phone. We test many of them on an intermittent mobile connection, and some never finish loading.
What will the Google Speed Update actually do?
Google's January announcement about using page speed in mobile search is measured. It states that the update will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users, and only a small percentage of queries. It states that the same standard applies regardless of the technology used to build the page. It also states that a slow page can still rank well if it has excellent, relevant content, because search intent remains a very strong signal.
This is therefore not a major upheaval. No site's rankings will collapse because a page takes three seconds to load instead of two.
What the update does is indicate the direction Google is taking. Mobile-first indexing began rolling out in March, and now speed on mobile follows. Google is conveying the same message in several ways: the mobile version of your site is becoming the primary one. We expect speed to carry increasing weight from here.
Beyond rankings, the main concern is the visitors themselves. A slow page loses visitors before Google is even involved. A person taps your link on a phone and sees a blank screen. They do not wait; they go back and select the next result.
Why are images usually the problem?
When a small business site is slow, the most common cause by far is images.
Phones take very large photos, and owners upload them directly to the site. A 5 MB photo of the dining room is displayed in a box 800 pixels wide, but the visitor still downloads the full 5 MB. With six such photos on a home page, the site loads well on office Wi-Fi but very slowly on a phone in the countryside.
The solutions are simple and effective:
- Resize images before uploading, to approximately the size at which they will be displayed.
- Compress them. Most photos lose no visible quality at a much smaller file size.
- Consider WebP. Chrome supports it and the files are noticeably smaller, but Safari, Firefox and Edge do not support it yet, so a JPEG fallback is still required.
- Lazy-load images below the fold, so the phone only downloads them when the visitor scrolls down. On WordPress, plugins are available for this.
Why should third-party scripts be reduced?
The second cause is everything the site loads from external sources: chat widgets, a social feed embedded in the footer, two analytics tools, a tracking pixel from an advertising campaign that ended long ago, fonts from four different families, a booking widget, and a pop-up tool.
Each one seems minor. Together, they can double the load time, and you have no control over the speed of any of them.
We apply a simple rule: if you cannot state what a script is for and who reviews its data, remove it. In most cases, it will not be missed. With the GDPR in force since last month, every script removed is also one less element to explain in your privacy policy.
What should be cached?
Caching means not rebuilding the same page from scratch for every visitor. On a WordPress site, a proper caching configuration at the server or through a plugin makes a significant difference. Browser caching means a returning visitor does not download your logo and stylesheet again on every visit. A CDN keeps copies of your files closer to your visitors, which matters a great deal when your server is in one country and your customers are around the world.
This work is not visible. It is typically configured once and then forgotten, until an update breaks it. This is one reason ongoing website maintenance matters more than many owners expect. Speed is not a one-time fix: sites become slower over time as plugins and images accumulate.
Low-cost hosting also deserves attention. Some of the slowest sites we have reviewed had no other issue than a server that took a full second to respond before anything began loading. Image optimisation alone cannot solve that problem.
Which page on your site should be tested first?
We regularly observe the same pattern: the slowest page on a site is the one that generates sales. The home page receives attention and has often been run through PageSpeed Insights at some point. The page where people actually buy or book, however, is the heavy one: a menu page with a large PDF, a booking page with an embedded widget that loads an entire second website, or a product page with a video, a slider, reviews from a third-party tool and a chat bubble.
That page generates revenue, and it is the one visitors abandon.
When testing, we therefore recommend going beyond the home page and testing the page you most want a customer to reach. Google directs people to PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, and PageSpeed Insights now shows real-world data from Chrome users for pages with sufficient traffic. Use these tools. Then test the page on your own phone, using mobile data, away from your office Wi-Fi. If the experience is frustrating for you, it is frustrating for your customers.
The solutions are not complicated: lighter images, fewer scripts, effective caching and adequate hosting. For a thorough review of your site, a technical SEO audit usually begins with these elements.
The work is rarely difficult, but it is rarely carried out.