Google Testing Faster & Lightweight Mobile Search & Optimizing Your Web Page For Slow Connections

Google is testing a way to speed up your web page speed for slow connections from their mobile search results. Yes, you can opt out.

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Google announced they are not just enabling a Google Lite for slow mobile connections on their search results page, but they are also testing optimizing your web pages after the searcher clicks from the mobile search results to your web site.

Google is basically showing them a toned down version of your web page, stripping out the heavy images and files, on a special Google URL.

Google said they are testing this in Indonesia for users on slow connections such as 2G speed. Google said the tests have shown thus far to load four times faster than the original page and use 80% fewer bytes, plus they saw a 50% increase in traffic to these optimized pages.

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Google added a help page that lets you test your web page through the optimized Google version. The URL is https://icl.googleusercontent.com/?lite_url=[your_website_URL], replace [your_website_URL] with your URL, for example, this site would be https://icl.googleusercontent.com/?lite_url=https://searchengineland.com.

How bad does the light weight version of the site look? Here is a screen shot:

sel-google-optimized-page

Not too great!

If you do not want Google to optimize your page because you don’t like how it looks, you want the page view, you don’t want it to by pass your ads or whatever, you can opt out. To opt out add to your HTTP header “Cache-Control: no-transform”.

This reminds me of Google Instant Pages from 2011.

To learn more about this, see the Google FAQs.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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