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How might Google get slow-loading websites to be faster?

Answer: By publicly shaming them for being slow.

It’s still in the development phase, but this new tool for Google Chrome could be a kick in the pants for getting slow websites to invest in speeding things up. 

Google has envisioned a couple of different ways in which it could alert the masses of what kind of loading time to expect. One is a warning page, where upon clicking on a website, the user will be greeted with a loading page that says “Usually loads slow.” There’s also the option for a multicolored progress bar at the top of the page that could turn green if the user clicks on a normally fast website or blue for a slower one.

As of yet Google has not announced a release date or even what the final version might look like, but in the meantime, the company is encouraging websites to start working on optimizing their speeds now. In a blog post about the feature, the company listed two of its tools that can be used to analyze your website performance, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.

Kate is a senior copy editor in Northern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in professional writing from the University of California, Davis.