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Non-Optimized Images are the Major Site Speed Issue Google Sees

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mobile headerIn a recent Google English/Hindi webmaster central office hours, the topic of page speed came up, which is one of the components that Google uses when determining if the site is mobile friendly or not. And not only that, longer loading times often results in users clicking back to the search results to go with the speedier option, particularly one on mobile.

They revealed that the biggest problem Google finds when site speed is an issue is the fact that images are not optimized for mobile. Yes, the might scale up and down in size depending on the width of the device, but the site is still loading the entire high resolution desktop version of the images, which brings site speed down.

The question was asked about optimizing images and other resources for page speed.

We have seen that a major problem for websites to be slow especially on mobile devices is not optimizing your images for mobile devices. So what we’ve seen is a lot of websites they still serve the same high-resolution heavy images that are supposed to be served for the desktop users. They serve the same thing to mobile users as well and this happens in the majority of cases. This is one of the major problems in making websites slower on mobile devices. So that is a major challenge.

Then of course there’s a lot of things you can fix, and yes by using the page speed insight tool and follow those guidelines and solutions there, you should be in a very good position.

So when you are optimizing a site, definitely check on the image sizes that you are serving to mobile users.   Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will now also optimize site images for you, along with CSS & Javascript files so they will load quicker, if you don’t have the skills to do it yourself.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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