Google Chrome Plans to Highlight Slow Websites with a Special Indicator

At the Chrome Dev Summit in San Francisco, Google engineers announced their plans to develop a system of indicators that will let Chrome users know whether they are visiting a slow or fast website. In the official Chrome blog, the team explained that their goal is to create a faster and more efficient web (indirectly encouraging developers to improve performance), while also giving users the ability to instantly assess the typical speed of any given site.

In the future, Chrome will likely be able to identify websites that usually load very slowly or very quickly, and will mark them with clear indicators. These indicators will not reflect the current loading speed of the site, but will be based on aggregated historical data that takes into account all previous loading issues (or the lack thereof). The developers also promise that Chrome will consider that a page may be slow only for a specific user, due to their device or network connection.

Google demonstrated what these indicators might look like in the future. As shown in the illustration, when loading a slow website, users may see a warning that the site typically loads slowly, suggesting they should wait. For fast websites, the loading progress bar might be green.

However, these plans are still in the early stages and may change. The proposed indicator designs are just initial concepts, and the developers plan to experiment with different options.

In their announcement, Google engineers also reminded developers about the usefulness of tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, which help evaluate performance and optimize web page loading speeds.