Possibly one of the most important decision you made when setting up your site was deciding whether you wanted to use a responsive, dynamic serving, or separate site configuration. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
While Google prefers responsive design it supports all three options as long as you have set them up properly.
Yet your configuration choice may affect your Google Page Speed Results and therefore your Google Search indexing
Begining in July 2018 will finally use mobile page speed as a ranking in their mobile search results.
According to searchengineland.com and its author Barry Schwartz
Earlier this year Google announced its latest algorithm update, named the Speed Update, that will be launching in July of this year. We asked Google several questions about this update, including how this impacts desktop pages, whether pages with AMP URLs but slow canonical URLs will be impacted, if webmasters will get Search Console notifications and more.
Here are some the questions and answers from a Google spokesperson that Barry Schwatz shared:
1. Are you still going to be using the desktop speed factor for the desktop index?
Correct, no changes to announce for desktop.
2. With the mobile-first index, will desktop rankings use mobile page speed and not use desktop page speed?
No, this change is about the mobile search results. As mentioned in our mobile-first indexing blog post, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
3. What about the sites that get the “unavailable” message in the PageSpeed Insights report? How do they properly prepare for this?
Developers are encouraged to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics. We encourage developers to use all the tools that make sense to them.
4. Can you give us a percentage of queries impacted by this?
This will affect a small percentage of queries.
5. Will there be a significant drop in ranking if the site is impacted?
Speed is just one of many signals that are used to rank pages. Keep in mind that intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.
6. Will there be a notification of some sort in Google Search Console, or it is completely algorithmic?
This is completely algorithmic. There is no tool that directly indicates whether a page is affected by this new ranking factor.
7. Is it using the same data you use in the PageSpeed Insights tool? The Chrome User Experience Data?
The intent of the signal is to improve the user experience on search. While we can’t comment on the types of data, we encourage developers to think broadly how about performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics when improving their site.