The most reliable way to get to #1 on Google is to have the best answer to the questions your prospective clients, patients, or customers are asking. What if you have competitors who are working hard to make sure that they have answers just as good as yours? Then mobile page speed matters.
In fact, just like old domains or any other technical SEO issue, mobile page speed only matters if you have worthwhile content to offer. It’s not going to make up for poor content or a bad user experience at your website.
All things being equal, though, it already matters. If your website is slow to load, Google will choose an equally good answer from a faster website. But mobile speed is going to matter quite a bit more in July. That’s when Google will make a big switch. At the moment, it’s your desktop page speed that matters most in judging site speed. In July, it will be the mobile page speed that is used to make the decision.
Don’t panic.
Google announced this back in January. They said at the time that the change “will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries… The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”
Google started indexing mobile versions of websites first in March of this year. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you’ve been getting lower rankings for quite some time. If your website delivers a poor mobile experience, it doesn’t matter much how fast it loads.
If you’ve got a responsive website with great content that takes a few seconds to load, you have till July to speed it up.
Start by checking your website’s mobile page speed.
Decision time
If your website is not mobile-friendly, get to work now looking for the funds to build a new website. You’re losing visitors, and their frustration may have serious effects on their feelings toward your brand.
If your website is slower than you’d like and it’s been live for less than three years, you might be able to do some tightening up to increase speed.
If your website is three years old or more and it’s not blazingly fast, it probably makes sense to build a new website. Chances are, there’s a better way to do a lot of the things your website currently does. Your business has probably made some changes, and maybe the world has, too.
If you use WordPress, we’d love to talk with you about your website needs. If you don’t use WordPress, we’d like to talk with you about that, too.
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