After Google announced in July 2018 that page speed was to become a ranking factor for SEO; webmasters, SEOs and developers alike have all been pushing to improve page speed to not only improve and maintain search rankings but also improve user experience.
Google has now announced that since they alerted website owners to this change back in January 2018, the slowest one-third of websites on the Internet have improved their page speed performance metrics by 15-20%.
To put this percentage into perspective, Google stated that no changes to page speed were seen for the lower band of websites at all in 2017 globally, meaning that this announcement triggered a positive change for the web.
Google gave webmasters 7 months to react and improve their websites. Whilst most were probably motivated by the fear of penalties or plummeting rankings, arguably this was a necessary evil for site owners to take page speed and user experience seriously. We are in a digital age where having a website isn’t enough to secure business, there will always be a better, quicker, more user-friendly website ready to steal your customers if they bounce from your website due to easy-fix issues that you aren’t prioritising.
With page speed improvements seen across more than 95% of countries, Google feels confident that the only way is up – but there is still more work to do. Ilya Grigorik of Google has said, “there is still the other 2/3rds that need a lot more attention.”