Recently, Google have announced a new feature to their popular Chrome browser, the 'speed badge'. It's not an actual, phyiscal badge nor one you will see appear stamped across your website, but one you will may notice when your website is loading when you use Google Chrome. According to Google, the purpose of the badging is to “reward” fast sites and to warn users of slow sites as a way to provide value to them, but Google does not say how a badge translates as a reward.
Typically, there is little known information about how Google will define your site as 'slow' but it is expect that it will base it on historical load latencies, so a newly redesigned site that is optimised for speed may find itself still showing itself as slow-loading for a little while. It is also suggested that Google will gives sites some time to catch up so these indicators may not happen to all affected sites immediately, but later down the line there may be stricter measures in place.
We must stress that how this will actually work still is not certain, but from what we understand so far Chrome will display a badge on the loading screen for sites that are slow loading sites (see the left hand image above) and for sites that load fast, a Green loading bar will be displayed (as shown on the right hand image). So as we said, there is no physical badge as such and there is no suggestion that these badges will cause any additional detriment to your search rankings. Google is experimenting all the time, so it may well be the case that how they choose to display these slow and fast loading sites may well differ from what we have seen so far. However, if you find that your site is loading with the 'slow loading' badge then it is time to find out why, this is where the digital marketing experts at Orca Online can help.
We can analyse your site to determine the cause/s of the slow loading; whether that be the hosting of the site, scripts that help the site function loading slowly, or perhaps something more serious such as malware or compromised files. Given that the loading speed of a website has an impact on your websites SEO, this isn't something that should be taken lightly.
If you have found your site loads with a slow-loading badge, or if you just want your site to be given a check to see how well things are running then drop us an email at marketing@5ringsgroup.co.uk or give us a call on 03332200555 and we will advise you on the best way forward.
