Blog Post

Google About To Shame Slow Loading Websites

Ted Edwards • 12 November 2019

In the interest of forcing website owners to pickup their game, Google is getting ready to display a pre-warning that your website sucks.

On the Chromium blog yesterday, Google made it abundantly clear that speed is a big issue and they're about to force peoples hand when it comes to slow loading websites. Chromium is the underlying open source code that powers popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Opera, Brave and very soon Microsoft Edge plus numerous others.

Not long ago, they introduced the wording "Not Secure" in the address bar for websites that weren't encrypting the traffic with https and many website owners soon scrambled to have their site secure. We can expect the same sort of scrambling to happen when they flick the switch on this too.

You can see in the pictures above the plan is to show a splash page of sorts whilst the site presumably loads in the background, calling out that the site usually loads slowly, vs the Google example with the green bar near the top indicating a faster loading site and obviously loading the page without the need of a splash pre-loader.

Whilst there's no indication as to when this is likely to happen, you can bet you boots it will happen. With tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to keep an eye on your speed, they'll be utilising the same technology to warn potential users of your sites load speed.

These updates will no doubt have many web designers panicking as it is notoriously common for many to use shared hosting in order to minimise their outlay. Unfortunately the trade off is slow loading websites, combined with a WordPress site full of plugins all loading code unnecessarily.

In a separate blog on the same day they also called out the use of Progressive Web Apps as being the future of the internet, becoming more evolved and listing them on the Play Store along with the Microsoft and Galaxy stores.

What do I need to do to speed up my site?

The good news is, Irez Enterprise clients are already on the front foot. We don't use shared hosting, we don;t use Wordpress or any other open source content management system (CMS) for that matter, and all your code and images are optimised already.

If you do have one of the other shortfalls, the good news is, you likely still have time to optimise your code & images and upgrade to decent hosting.

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