About 70% of your web visitors find your dental business on their phones. For this reason alone it’s a good idea to get a slick responsive website set up if you haven’t already. But now there’s another reason: the performance of your mobile site is going to be the one Google uses to rank you.
The majority of mobile sites are slow and bloated with too many elements, and Google has been emphasising the importance of speeding them up since it announced mobile first indexing in 2016, when your website’s performance on mobile began to affect your search rankings. Since then Google has been testing this on groups of websites and gradually pushing out the change to more and more searchers.
The date of the full roll out of the mobile first index keeps changing but it looks likely to be early 2018. The switch from desktop to mobile first means that when Google crawls and assesses a site for ranking position, it’ll do it from the mobile perspective first.
Google has also said it’s going to start using the speed of your mobile pages instead of your desktop pages when determining your overall rankings. Bloggers have checked to see whether this has happened yet, and it seems to be happening piecemeal.
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GET YOUR MOBILE SITE DOWN TO 3 SECONDS BEFORE NEW YEAR
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Google recommends a page loading speed of three seconds, but no one is anywhere near that yet. The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, yet 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. It goes without saying that if you do achieve three seconds you will be way ahead of the pack on user experience and page ranking.
Improving mobile speed is clearly a pressing priority for Google. It created the Accelerated Mobile Project (AMP) a couple of years ago, which aims to turbo charge web pages and ads in a different format that enables them to load almost instantly. One early adopter of AMP was the Washington Post, which said: “If our site takes a long time to load, it doesn’t matter how great our journalism is, some people will leave the page before they see what’s there.”
Bounce rates certainly increase sharply between three and five seconds, as a Google study this year found.
The good news is there’s plenty of low hanging fruit. Simply compressing images and text can be a game changer — 30% of pages could save more than 250KB that way. You can also turn off certain functions depending on the device, so for example you can choose to show a maximum of three images per mobile page even when your desktop version contains many more.
Hosting can also make a significant difference to speed, and this isn’t necessarily a price thing, it’s more to do with finding the right host for your web coding platform. There are certain hosts that are tailored to WordPress sites, and others have dedicated servers.
Let us know if you need things speeding up before the new year. Often we get clients coming to us with 20-30 second load speeds and we get them down to around 3 seconds — check out our case studies. For enquiries email [email protected]
Kind regards
Stewart Roode, Fine Online
PS, all our websites are built with HTTPS, which has now become another important Google ranking factor. Does your site have the green padlock?
“53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load”
Stewart Roode, Fine Online