Google: Moving Towards a Faster Web

Google always wants to improve the quality of the web for all of its users. In the last few years, Google has focused on optimising the web for mobile users; now it's focussing on websites' speed.

This isn't anything new. Back in July 2018, Google rolled out "The Speed Update" for their Search Engine, which considered a website's loading speed as part of the Search Result Algorithm; Google began rewarding sites with faster load times and penalising those without. We blogged about this in August of last year.

Now, Google are in talks about making an update to their browser, Chrome, regarding website loading speed. In the future, Chrome may flag up sites that tend to load fast or slow for users with clear badging - much like when they started badging sites without SSL as not secure.

Google plan to experiment with different options in order to work out which badging technique provides the most value to its users. The badging is intended to let users know when a site is built in a way that causes it to load slowly, so Google will roll out different ideas and see which has the most impact on Chrome's users.

Google will start by looking at a number of Chrome surfaces, including the loading screen and the loading progress bar. You could see something like the below screenshots when opening a site in Chrome:
 

How does this impact you?

Web users want everything instantly. Slow loading web pages can result in users getting bored of waiting, returning to the search results and looking at another site. Now imagine before they've even opened your website, they're being warned it's slow. Would they carry on waiting for it to load? Statistically, no.

What's the solution to this?

Earlier this year, we released our Webkit 5 platform, whose main feature was increasing the load speed of websites. Simply upgrading to Webkit 5 could see a massive improvement in your website's loading speed.

We saw phenomenal results for our clients that adopted Webkit 5. Some of our clients jumped from a Speed Score in the 30s all the way up to the 90s! 

For example:
 

See more results here!

You can test your own website using Google's very own Page Insights here.

If you'd like to increase your speed score and ensure there are no "slow loading" flags on your webpages when Google releases this functionality to Chrome, we can absolutely upgrade you to our Webkit 5 platform. Speak to our Support Team on 02380 633 644 today or drop us a message.