Google Speed Update Rollout: Page Speed Now Counts on Mobile

After months of speculation and debate, it’s official: as of today, Monday, July 9, 2018, the Google Speed Update is live. Here’s a recap and what it means.

Announced at the start of the year for July 2018 (without many more details), the Google Speed Update has now rolled out. What is it? What impact will it have? Have any changes been spotted yet? Here’s everything you need to know.

What Is the Google Speed Update?

On desktop, a page that loads fast has a better chance of ranking well than a page that loads slowly. Why? Because Google’s desktop search has used page speed as one of its many ranking factors for several years. Until today, that rule didn’t apply to mobile search. Now it does.

Google announced the rollout on Twitter today, saying the Speed Update, which enables page speed in mobile search ranking, is now rolling out for all users.

How Does the Google Speed Update Work?

Google shared very little at first about how it would work, and it was expected to differ from the desktop version. Over the past few weeks, though, the details have come out more often and become clearer.

We already knew that it would only affect the slowest pages, and that Google would evaluate speed on a gradual scale rather than with a simple fast-or-slow cutoff. In other words, only the slowest mobile pages risked losing ground.

Now that theory has turned into practice, what’s actually happening? It’s still a little early to say. You can read Google’s original announcement, Using page speed in mobile search ranking, on its webmaster blog.

Where Things Stand in 2026

Speed has only become more important since 2018. Google’s page experience update, rolled out in 2021, brought Core Web Vitals into ranking, and on March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) as the responsiveness metric (more in our article on INP replacing FID in Core Web Vitals). For a practical checklist, see our guide to website speed optimization.

Want a Faster Website?

Référenceur is a French-speaking digital marketing agency from Belgium and Luxembourg that helps businesses, including U.S. companies we support remotely, speed up their sites through performance-focused web design and improve their search visibility. Get a free assessment of your site’s performance.