It's official: Google cares about how fast your site loads

It’s official: Google cares about the experience people have on your website.

In fact, it will factor in how well they rank you.

Google recently announced a project Web Vitals and the implications for founders, business owners, and website managers are pretty interesting. This tool that Google released (full announcement here) allows you to view Google’s official guidance on how they view the experience on your website, and how to improve it. Google has gone so far to say that this is definitely a ranking factor (it's been debated for years but Google has remained silent) and will officially go into effect in 2021.

Right now they just offer a NPM library or a chrome extension to view insights for any given page and recommend improvements.

This is a big opportunity. We can't control how much content there is out there in our respective domains, but we can control the quality of our own sites and there are more tools than ever to help make improvements. As someone who's bought into site speed as an unofficial ranking factor it's cool to see it finally come true.

Ran a full writeup on my own site with a bit more analysis!