Google has recently announced a tool to help webmasters measure their website’s speed and mobile-friendliness.
The website takes your URL, evaluates your mobile design and loading speed and then scores it somewhere between 1 and 100. It looks at elements such as CSS, HTML, scripts and images to see how long it takes for your website to load on both a desktop and mobile device.
According to Google and their data, the average user exits a website if it doesn’t load on a mobile device in three or less seconds, so if your website takes any longer than that, your score will be lower.
As well as the score, you can also read more information as to why you received that figure. You'll receive a list of points describing any potential issues and what you can do to fix them and raise your score.
“On average, people check their phones more than 150 times a day, and more searches occur on mobile phones than computers. But if a potential customer is on a phone, and a site isn’t easy to use, they’re five times more likely to leave” Google wrote in a blog post.
This can be an extremely useful tool for website owners - the breakdown of the results is a great way to not only see that you have a problem with the site, but to also help understand why it's a problem. As well as this, the data can be passed on to your website developer who would then be able to implement the changes in order to boost your website's score on the Google testing site.
We would also recommend you read our blog post on why a non-responsive/mobile friendly website will hurt your search rankings. It's imperative that your website is fully responsive and quick to load.
If you want to test your own site you can do so by going to https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com and enter your website URL.