While since 2010 the speed of your website was already included as a determining factor in Google desktop rankings, this has been the case since July this year also for mobile searches. Google's blog states that this update will only impact the slowest pages in the search results and only within certain searches.

The “Speed ​​Update,” as we're calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries.

Google Webmaster Blog

However, the intent of the search query still takes precedence over the speed of the page. A page that is not that fast, but best matches what the user is looking for, will simply be displayed high in the results.

The fact that speed matters also becomes clear when we look at the results of a number of studies that Google itself has conducted. This shows that the chance of a bounce increases by 1% with a loading time between 3 and 32 seconds. With a loading time between 1 and 5 seconds, this chance increases by 90%. A loading time of 1 to 10 seconds increases the chance of a bounce by 123%. The longer the loading time of your site, the more opportunities you miss!

3 ways to check your Page Speed

The speed of your website was already important, but now it becomes even more important as it can now also influence the ranking of your site in the mobile search results. Making and keeping your website fast is therefore important. We previously wrote about what you can do to make your WordPress website or platform faster.  But when is “faster” fast enough? Here are three resources you can use to check the speed and performance of your website:

• The Google PageSpeed ​​test: through this special test, Google looks at how fast your website is and how accessible it is for desktop and mobile. These tests result in practical recommendations that you can immediately implement in your site.
• Lighthouse: this is an integrated one audit tool in the Chrome web browser. With this tool you can perform an audit for every website that checks the website for speed and accessibility. It also gives you detailed information about the rendering of the website so you can see where you can improve the user experience.
• Chrome User Experience Report: A final, slightly more complex way to see how your site ranks is to compare it to the web's most visited sites. In the Chrome User Experience Report All kinds of metrics of the most visited websites worldwide are tracked. You can then compare your own website with the most visited sites in the world.

Want to turn your website into a sprinter?

Van Ons is happy to help you optimize the speed of your corporate site, shop or platform. We have extensive experience in optimizing the codebase and setting up the perfect server setup. This makes your website lightning fast and guarantees a higher position in the search results. Call the office (020 331 81 77) and ask for Jeffrey, Marcel or Dennis. They are happy to help you!