Chrome’s ‘Fast page’ label shows which websites have quick loading times
Google is launching a new Web Vitals metric with Chrome 85 beta — one that can tell you if a page you’re visiting won’t take forever to load. The new metric will give URLs and URLs from the same website “that have historically met or exceeded all metrics thresholds for the Core Web Vitals” a “Fast page” label. Links that earn the label have been historically fast for most users, though Chrome can also evaluate them on a host-by-host basis if they’re still new or if they’re not that popular.
The Fast page label will show up on the context menu when you long press on any link on Chrome 85 Beta for Android. It’s only just started rolling out, but you can manually switch it on by going to chrome://flags and enabling “Context menu performance info and remote hint fetching.” Google is hoping that the label can help users with slow or spotty connection by giving them the information needed to choose which page to open from all the search results they get. The tech giant says it may also experiment with labeling in other parts of the Chrome UI in the future.
Google launched the Web Vitals initiative in May in an effort to show users which websites typically perform well. It gives website owners and developers a unified set of metrics to measure against so they can ensure that their websites are loading swiftly for visitors. A few weeks after the initiative’s debut, Google revealed that in the future, it will take “page experience” based on Web Vitals into account when ranking pages in Search.
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