mobile Page Speed has finally been confirmed as a strong incoming ranking factor in Google’s mobile search results – and will start taking hold in July of 2018.
Google is calling it the “Speed Update”, and “will affect the pages that deliver slow experience to users.”
Since it will officially go live in July 2018, this gives webmasters and business owners time to prepare their web pages, by compressing images, cleaning up scripts, redesigning older sites to more mobile-friendly formats, add encryption, and also consider commercial grade hosting, rather than shared virtual hosted services.
Back in 2010, Google said that Page Speed was a ranking factor but it “was focused on desktop searches only” only. In July, it will look at how fast your mobile pages are and use that as a strong ranking factor in mobile search. Google has been promising this change for years now, and it is officially scheduled.
It’s not clear yet whether the same changes will be applied to desktop searches, but this is also expected, as Google pushes sites to be more consumer friendly, and more efficient across all devices.