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Is Your Mobile Page Speed Affecting Your Google Ranking?

By Mira Brody - Last Updated on 02/22/2018
Although overall mobile experience and load speed were already among the many qualifiers Google uses to determine your site’s ranking, now they are taking into account the speed of your site when accessed on a mobile device. This means if your site is slow to the point that it provides a poor experience on a tablet or phone, Google will bump you down in ranking.

What determines site speed?
Users want speed. In fact, you’ll start losing site visitors if a page takes longer than three seconds to load. First off, make sure your website is in fact, optimized for mobile. This means your website adapts to the size of the screen your visitors are viewing it on. Here are a few things that could be affecting the loading speed of your website:
Images — Imagery on your site that is not properly processed will bloat load times. Use an image compressing tool to downsize them into a more manageable form. For our customers: the image upload in My JTech will automatically compress any images you upload to ensure good performance.
Active scripts — This may be something your web developer has to check on, but poorly written scripts that make up your site can decrease your page performance.
Host — With cheap hosting companies, not only are you on your own with customer service, but their servers are overloaded as well. If you’re hosting with a cheap company such as GoDaddy, it may be affecting your site’s speed — if you’ve noticed poor performance, look into your provider and consider upgrading to a better-quality hosting company.

How to test your site’s speed.
Google provides a handy tool to test the speed of your website. Type in the URL you wish you test, and it’ll provide your score.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Conclusion
Google’s algorithm update that punishes slow-performing mobile sites will take affect in July 2018. This change is purely algorithmic, so there will be no details provided indicating which pages are being affected. To prepare, take the site speed test provided, and if you rank poorly give us a call! Don’t let your search ranking suffer due to poor performance.
Mira Brody:

About Mira Brody

Mira Brody is an editor, writer, and marketing expert with 12+ years of experience. She has worked as a local news reporter, a writer/editor, and as a leader in large-scale branding strategy. Mira worked at JTech as the staff writer and editor for internal and client projects from March 2015 to December 2019.

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