Is Your Website the Tortoise or the Hare? Page speed affects your ranking!

People are impatient. That should come as no surprise to roofing company owners who have to deal with clients that always want work done faster. What might surprise you is that speed is important to your website too. Not only will people leave your site if it takes to long to load it will also affect your rank with Google.

That’s right. Google is grading your website’s speed right now. If it thinks your website isn’t loading quickly but your competition’s site is you might be getting penalized and showing up lower than your competition.

The need for speed: Google dedicates engineering team to accelerate development of WordPress ecosystem

Speed, mobile-first and WordPress

Google has been focusing on speed, speed, and then also speed, for eight years now. It formally announced a Speed Update that will roll out in July 2018, using mobile page speed as a ranking factor in mobile search results.

It has also announced that the mobile-first index has begun rolling out — meaning that Google has started indexing and using for ranking in SERPs, the mobile version of a website. The emphasis on mobile and speed is driven by data that demonstrates most searches are now performed on mobile devices. Slow, poorly performing sites result in a bad user experience and negatively impact site engagement, as well as conversions.

With the goal of assisting site owners in improving page load time for mobile visitors, Google launched the AMP project in 2015. Google has been aggressive in pushing adoption via the open-source community, working with platform plugin developers as well as providing large brand sites with developer resources to implement the technology. Even so, adoption of this mobile-friendly framework across the web has been slow: It’s estimated that fewer than .1 percent of all websites are using the markup language.
Read the entire story at searchengineland.com...

Speed is only one of the factors that Google uses to rank websites but it is an important one and it is only going to become more important. You can find out right now how your website is ranking with a FREE SEO Analysis from Roofing Contractor Marketing. See how you stack up against your competition and what you can do to beat them now!

 

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