Although it’s been talked about for quite some time, now it’s official – Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that page loading speed is a factor in mobile search ranking, as studies show that users care about page speed, especially on mobile.
Page loading speed used to be a ranking signal only for desktop searches, but starting July 2018, it will also be a factor for mobile searches. According to Google, this factor will only affect a small percentage of websites, those with pages that deliver a very slow loading time.
Webmasters are encouraged to improve user experienced and website performance in order to ensure their pages are not affected by this ranking update.
Here are some tools to help you analyze your website’s Page Speed. For best results, use all of them:
Google PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well your pages perform on mobile and desktop (separately), with a score of 1/100. The tool also provides useful optimization suggestions, and lists the optimizations already present on your pages.
GTmetrix, a very popular tool that gives you insights on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. GTmetrix also measures the actual loading time by seconds.
Pingdom, a robust tool which analyzes multiple factors, also displaying file requests load order and allows a choice of server from which to evaluate the page speed (US, Australia, Sweden).