We have posted many times before on the importance of mobile searching and how this has overtaken desktop. The subsequent importance of being mobile friendly has obviously risen and become more important in relation to this. One way of assessing whether your website is mobile friendly is the speed – i.e. the time it takes for the page to load. Until recently, you have been able to do this in one of two ways:
1) Test your website yourself on a mobile device by counting how long it takes to open.
2) Use a basic tool which displays the speed of your site, whether this is average good or poor and be shown how you can improve on this.
(Incase you are wondering, the average page load time is around 3 seconds – less is obviously better.)
Now a tool exists which has been released by Google which goes a little further than this and allows you to look into more aspects related to load time and your website. If you want to have a look or try for yourself, click the link and enter your own details in.
The main drive behind releasing this new tool was some research which suggests that most people ‘give up’ on a mobile site while it is loading. The obvious implications for loss of customers, business and revenue can be very high and costly, so it is worth testing your own site for peace of mind or just out of curiosity.
This new tool not only allows you the chance to see the load time, but how many visitors are potentially lost during the process. This can give you a good indication and you may be able to weigh and add up the amount of potential audience and leads you are simply throwing away. The other thing the new tool allows for is to compare your speed time to that of your competitors by an industry standard. We all know that if someone is looking for something specific and doesn’t engage with a site for whatever reason, they will simply just go to another related site. This is the last thing you want if they are turning away from your website. Having this data to hand can also be useful because you can see how you stack up compared to others.
The final new feature on the tool gives you can estimate of how much time you can take off should you be able to make changes. By being armed with this information, it is easy to work out just how much improvements could be beneficial for your website and company.
The change (or perhaps adaptation) to the tool might seem quite small, but the extra add-ons are actually quite useful features and will certainly help you out in your quest to make your mobile site even better.
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