• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2019

Google began publicly rolling out an "experimental" speed report to all Search Console users.

The announcement was made Monday after a six-month test period. The report aims to identify speed performance issues to diagnose and address those that slow page-load times. It also shows the types of URLs that serve up more quickly to give marketers and webmasters a better understanding of how their sites perform.

The data can help marketers and webmasters drill down to specific issues by serving up an image of slow, average and fast pages that are clickable to see more details.

“If you fix an issue, use the report to track whether users experienced a performance improvement when browsing the fixed version of your website,” Google Software Engineers Sion Schori and Amir Rachum wrote in a post published today.

Marketers or webmasters working on web sites can find the report in the “Enhancements” section of the Google Search Console. The report also links to the Page Speed Insight tool that provides information on specific optimization techniques for each URL.

Research released earlier this year suggests that the faster a page can load in a mobile browser, the higher it tends to rank in search engine query results.

Sites that appear on page one of Google display their primary content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds, according to the Searchmetrics Google Lighthouse Ranking Factors 2019 whitepaper details the level of technical optimization of ranking websites on Google.