Google Wants A Faster Web And Could Punish Slow Loading Websites
Where I am from, the internet is so slow that loading Gmail basic HTML is a bit of a tradition here. It is not just Gmail that is a pain to load but most bandwidth-hogging sites Facebook and YouTube are basically untouchable during working hours and the general perception is that sites load slowly because the internet is slow.
This perception however is obviously flawed as there are many factors that play into how a site loads and the factors range from HTTP requests to Server location and even though a slow internet in most cases equals slower load times, it is not the only culprit.
Google, however, seems to work to change that, with how fast web pages load being the center of discussion during this year’s Chrome Developer Summit.
Despite seemingly garnering focus during this year’s event. site load speeds have been a priority for the company evident in its push to prioritize using AMP versions of a site when indexing web pages.
Google wants web site creators to consider load speeds when designing their web-pages and has offered tools to aid in that endeavor and is promising to “shame” sites that do not take heed.
The company hasn’t yet detailed how it intends to “punish” slow loading websites but it says it is going to experiment with different merit systems where slow web pages are labeled.
This includes showing a “Loading…” when a site takes forever to fetch data and even adding a warning, like a caution icon and text that reads “usually loads slow.” However, snappy sites will probably get a different colored progress indicator alerting the users accessing the site it does load fast.
Google is also adding a context menu to Chrome allowing users to decided whether or not they should click on links based on the speed data provided.
The company did indicate that how it determines fast loading sites expands beyond mere speed as it will continue to experiment with several ways to tag sites based on how fast or slow they load.
