Google has posted on their webmaster blog that the results of announcing and launching a new algorithmic ranking factor - the Speed Update, resulted in an overall faster web. Google said they "observed improvements on many pages across the web" in terms of speed of slower sites.
Google shared a few metrics:
The Slowest Web Sites Got 15-20% Faster
Google said that when looking at the slowest web sites on the web, on average those web sites got 15 to 20% faster. Google said "For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018." The previous year, when Google didn't warn that slow web sites will see a drop in Google rankings, Google said they saw "no improvement was seen in 2017."
Overall - A Faster Web Globally
Google said that 95% of all countries were able to speed up their web sites overall. Google wrote "We observed improvements across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds."
Less Abandonment Rates From Search
Google said one of the metrics they saw reduced by 20% was people going to search, clicking on a result and then coming back to the search results because the site they clicked on loaded slow. Google wrote "When a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, we've observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search, a metric that site owners can now also measure via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome."
PageSpeed Insights Tool Is Being Used
Google said the PageSpeed Insights tool was run on over a billion URLs with feedback for over 200 million unique urls. Google wrote "In 2018, developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique urls."
Very often, when Google says something is going to be a ranking factor, webmasters take action. We saw it with the mobile-friendly update and the HTTPS update, amongst other updates.
"For the slowest one-third of traffic, we (Google Search) saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017": https://t.co/1jXoQOtT0p
— Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) April 4, 2019
Kudos y'all for the great work! My only ask is, please continue in 2019! :-) pic.twitter.com/H1wd1dNw8V
alas, there is still the other 2/3rds that need a lot more attention.. that said, this was a huge milestone and win for the web in 2018 and I'm excited about all the great work ahead of us — stay tuned.
— Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) April 4, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
