Google PageSpeed mobile score a factor on search ranking from July 2018 onwards

The world is going increasingly Mobile with faster internet connections and high bandwidth content. Google PageSpeed Mobile score was stated to be used for search rankings from July 2018. The new update, namely, “Speed Update”, de-ranks very slow websites under certain situations. It’s not a big surprise as search engine results have to be increasingly optimized for mobile friendly content. On an average, a mobile user has to wait at least 10 seconds for loading a non-mobile friendly web page. If you don’t have mobile optimized versions for your webpages, you have a very high probability of ending up with low search rankings and dissatisfied visitors.

Is your website mobile-friendly?

Check out our insightful tool, 365andUP.com, and know how good your website performs on mobile friendliness. If your PageSpeed Mobile score is below 65%, well, we suggest you take a good look at the web performance recommendations.

What does Google mean by Mobile friendly ?

Smartphone usage is in its peak these days, 85% of the traffic from the US are from mobile phones. For Google, to efficiently cater those user base, they have to change the way the website results are displayed on a search.

Here are the few points which makes a website mobile friendly.

1. Responsive Designs.

If the website is not responsive, it is high time to start thinking about investing on a responsive design. A responsive design will allow a user to have the same experience on desktops and handheld devices. The goal is to build web pages that detect the visitor’s screen size and orientation and change the layout accordingly. It allows one to have an optimal viewing experience easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a wide range of devices.

The example image below shows the same content has been displayed along all the devices, so the user will get same experience across all the devices.

2. Separate Mobile Website
It is recommended to setup an entirely new mobile website for mobile users under m.website.com or website.mobi or even under a subfolder – website.com/mobile, however Google says, the same contents should be included in the both the versions.
Apart from the design point of view, there should be mechanisms to find where the connections are coming from ( User Agents ) and serve accordingly. Connections from mobile devices should be redirected to the mobile version and connections from desktop should be directed to the desktop versions, hence the cost of maintenance on this approach will be on the higher side.

One thing to take care on implementing a separate mobile website is to include bi-directional annotations. Read more about that here.

The example image below shows how a connection is redirected depending on the User Agent.

So, what’s the bottom line?

Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches since 2015. Having a mobile friendly web content, and a good Google PageSpeed Mobile score is more important than ever. However, the PageSpeed Mobile score as such, is not any guarantee of very good search rankings. The quality and relevance of your web content matter too.

The post Google PageSpeed mobile score a factor on search ranking from July 2018 onwards appeared first on Sysally.