Do Slow Websites Annoy You? Google Chrome Will Warn You

Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers out there and for a good reason. The web browser is constantly adding new tweaks and updates to optimize users’ web browsing experience. It was https or SSL certificate issue two years ago that filtered many websites out of presence on Google platform and now Google Chrome wants to start isolating slow-loading websites.

You know how frustrating it is when you click on a web link or open a website and the page takes an eternity to load while you sit there waiting and watching before you abandon the webpage. That’s what Google will start to steer you away from. In a blog post, Google Chrome revealed that it plans to introduce a badge of shame for websites that load slowly on the browser.

In the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging
This may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users.

Chrome is adding the badge with the intention to highlight websites that are tortoise-slow at loading. Google will also look at a webpage’s historical loading data to determine which sites take time to load and flag them.

Google is hoping that its unique shaming technique will motivate developers to speed up page-load times. The company is still contemplating on how to label sites with long loading times. One way is to simply badge the site with the words “usually loads slow” with a red loading screen on the browser or a green progress bar to indicate that the website loads fast.

Although no timeline has been given by Google on when these warning will start showing up, the Chrome team did mention that their plan to identify and label sites as fast or slow will be rolled out “in gradual steps, based on increasingly stringent criteria.” When rolled out, the feature will save user’s time as they can notice and only visit websites that load faster.