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Google: The Web is Faster Since Page Speed Became a Ranking Factor

Google: The Web is Faster Since Page Speed Became a Ranking Factor

Google says sites are faster and abandonment rates are down since making page speed a ranking factor last year.

In 2018, Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Around that time improvements starting being observed across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, web pages in more than 95% of countries have improved speeds.

There was even improvement in a certain segment of sites where there was no improvement the previous year:

“For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017.”

Developers are clearly making page speed a priority. In 2018, they ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits for over 200 million unique URLs.

Abandonment Rates are Down

As is well understood in online marketing–the longer a site takes to load, the more likely users are to abandon it.

Well, it turns out the opposite is also true. When a site loads faster, users are more likely to stay.

“Thanks to these speed improvements, we’ve observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search.”

Site owners can measure their abandonment rate metric via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.

Category News Mobile SEO
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SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal

Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, ...

Google: The Web is Faster Since Page Speed Became a Ranking Factor

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