Chrome May Start Labelling Slow Sites

A label in the browser itself

On Monday, Chrome's developers said the browser may in future identify sites that typically load slowly, and possibly mark out the ones that load quickly.

Places they plan to experiment with include the screen shown while a page loads, the loading bar, and the menu that appears when somebody presses on a link. Nothing has been decided, and no date has been given.

Until now, speed has mostly been discussed as a search ranking question, invisible to the visitor. A label in the browser would put it in front of the person waiting.

The direction is clear even if the details are not, and the causes of a slow small business site are usually obvious enough to fix now.

What has and has not been said

Chrome's team said early versions would look at how a site has typically loaded in the past, and that later ones might take account of the visitor's device and connection.

It described the aim as helping people understand when a site may load slowly, while rewarding sites that load fast.

What it has not said: what counts as slow, how a label would look, or when, if ever, it will ship. Anybody quoting a threshold is guessing.

What slow means to the person waiting

• A blank screen for several seconds after tapping the link.
• Text that appears late, held back while fonts download.
• A page that jumps as images and banners load above the text.
• Taps that do nothing, because the phone is still running scripts.
• A spinner where the booking calendar or map should be.

The fourth is the one owners rarely see for themselves. A recent phone on office Wi-Fi runs scripts quickly; a mid-range phone on a cellular connection may ignore the first few taps while it catches up.

Why your own visits look fast

You probably check your site on a good connection and a recent device, having visited it many times. Much of it is already stored on that device and barely needs downloading.

A customer arriving for the first time downloads everything, often on a phone a few years old, over a signal that varies from street to street.

So test the way they arrive: a mid-range phone, Wi-Fi switched off, and a site you have not opened on that phone before.

The usual causes

On small business sites, a handful of causes account for most slowness, and none of them is subtle.

Camera photographs uploaded as they came off the card, each several megabytes, many times what a phone screen can show. WordPress 5.3, released yesterday, now scales the largest uploads down, but only new ones.

Video backgrounds and sliders on the home page, which load large files before the visitor sees a word of text.

Scripts from other companies' servers: chat windows, review widgets, social feeds, maps and tracking tags. Then several web fonts in several weights, and a slow server, which delays everything because nothing starts until it answers.

A worked example

A zipline park in the mountains sells most of its tours to visitors deciding on the day, on a phone, often in a highway pullout with a weak signal.

Its home page opened with a video of a rider crossing a canyon, followed by a gallery of guest photographs, a reviews widget, a live chat window and the booking calendar, each loading its own scripts.

On the office computer the page looked instant. On a mid-range phone over cellular, the booking button appeared and then ignored taps for several seconds while the phone worked through everything above it.

The plan for the quiet season replaces the video with one compressed photograph, moves the gallery to its own page and removes the chat window.

The booking calendar will load only on the booking page, with a plain button pointing to it from everywhere else, and every change will be tested on the same phone, in the same pullout.

Third-party scripts, one at a time

Every script from another company's server adds a dependency: on that server's speed, on its reliability, and on how much work its code asks of the visitor's phone.

List them. For each, ask what it does for the business and whether anybody would notice it gone. Chat windows nobody staffs and widgets nobody clicks are common, and removing them costs nothing.

Tracking tags deserve the same question. A pixel from an advertising campaign that ended last year still loads on every visit until somebody removes it.

What stays can often load after the page is usable, rather than first.

The server's share

Nothing on a page can start until the server sends its first response. A slow, overloaded or badly configured host adds that delay to every page, on every visit.

Page caching, a current PHP version and a plan suited to the site's traffic all shorten it. Your host or web company can tell you how quickly your server responds, and whether that is reasonable.

Where to start looking

The Speed report added to Search Console last week shows which groups of pages real Chrome visitors find slow. PageSpeed Insights shows what each page loads and suggests what to fix.

Neither tool replaces holding a phone and watching your own site load from cold.

Begin with the pages that carry the business: the home page, the main service or product pages, and whichever page holds the booking or contact form.

The counter-case

The label may never ship, or may appear only for the very slowest sites. It would also be Chrome's alone, and many of your visitors, including most iPhone users, browse in Safari.

So this is not a reason to rebuild a site in a panic, or to chase a perfect score. A reasonably quick site has better uses for its budget than shaving off fractions of a second.

But slow pages already cost visitors, label or no label, and the obvious causes are cheap to fix.

Fixing the obvious causes

1. Test the home page on a mid-range phone.
2. Switch Wi-Fi off and use cellular.
3. Check the Speed report for slow groups.
4. Compress every large photograph.
5. Remove one script nobody would miss.
6. Replace video and sliders with one image.
7. Ask your host how quickly the server responds.

Step two is what changes the picture. On office Wi-Fi almost any site feels quick; on cellular, the delays your customers live with become obvious within seconds.

Reading the field data Google already publishes for your pages is covered in Search Console's new Speed report.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.