I want to get a bit technical and talk about search engine optimisation (SEO) for a minute.

The history of SEO is an interesting one. A long time ago it was easy enough to get your site ranked by just adding the right keywords (hashtags for the web) and submitting to the search engines. But as time went on and competition increased, Google began to rank sites by different things. One of the main consideration today is mobile performance. They call this "Core Web Vitals".

(The official Google notification about mobile page speed ranking: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search )

What this means is that if your site loads quickly on a mobile devices like a phone or iPad, Google will give you a boost in search engine ranking. It makes sense too because last year, over 70% of web traffic in the UK was on mobile devices. Google wants visitors that find sites in their search to have a fast and easy browsing experience on mobile.

The problem with this is that a lot of the web tech hasn't caught up. Because so many sites are still using legacy content management systems and bloated page builders, those sites are not optimised for mobile and score badly on Google’s page speed tool.

Google provides a handy little tool for checking any site for Core Web Vitals. This link will take you to the report for the website you're on now: https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-www-nextweb-studio/dxdyy2spjy?form_factor=mobile

As you can see, our site scores really high, over 90%+ across the board. This is because the sites we build for our clients are different:

• We don't use legacy content management systems or page builders
• All designs are "mobile first" which means we optimise for mobile users before we add the extra stuff for laptop and desktop users.

You can check your existing site (or any other site) here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

If you're worried about your low Core Web Vitals score and how that affects your search ranking, talk to us. We've rebuilt many of our existing clients' sites, taking them off slow page builders or content management systems and onto our hand - built, mobile optimised platform.

And we routinely achieve a Google page speed score of 90%+

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Learn more about Google's ranking system changes: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/page-experience

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search