Chrome for Android will now label ‘fast pages’ and may eventually rank them higher in search.

It’s part of Google’s bigger push to improve user experience in ChromeChrome for Android will begin adding “fast page” labels to the context menus of pages it considers high-quality, Google announced Monday. The company says the labels will be based on signals from its Core Web Vitals metrics, which keep track of user experience, including page load time, responsiveness, and how stable content is while it loads.

Right now, there’s only one way to tell: if you long-press a link before visiting a page, you’ll get that “fast page” label if it meets Google’s standards.

But ultimately, a “fast page” might get ranked higher in Google search as well. Google tells, that those same Core Web Vitals metrics are among the criteria that will eventually be considered in search rankings.

Pages deemed fast loading, according to Core Web Vitals, will receive a ‘fast page’ badge in the link context menu. Users can access the link context menu by performing a long press on any hyperlink on a webpage.

Core Web Vitals looks at three key metrics when determining if a site is fast or not:

• Largest Contentful Paint: The time it takes for a webpage’s main content to load.
• First Input Delay: The time it takes before a user can interact with a webpage.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: A page’s visual stability and the number of unexpected layout shifts a website has.

Sites that consistently meet or exceed the Core Web Vitals thresholds will receive the ‘fast page’ tag.

Because this tag is designed to help users on spotty internet connections know if a page will load quickly or not, only those who’ve activated “Lite” mode or turned on “Make Searches and Browsing Better” will see them.

In the blog post announcing the labels, Google says that “optimizing for the Core Web Vitals may require some investments in improving page quality,” suggesting that developers may want to pay attention if they want to stay on top of Google search. The company says it has updated its developer tools with recommendations for how to meet those page quality goals. Google also has its own AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format, which it previously pushed to make the mobile web faster, but this may be another way of achieving the same goal.

These “fast page” labels will be included in the beta version of Chrome 85, but if devs really want to see it in action before then, Google has instructions on how to enable the feature.

Google is rolling the badge out on a limited basis on the Android Chrome 85 Beta, but a broader rollout will come soon. If you want to activate it now, you can type chrome://flags in the Chrome URL box and enable “Context menu performance info and remote hint fetching.”

There’s no word on when the ‘fast page’ tag will come to desktop.

Google Also announced it’ll make changes to curb the use of mixed forms, which are forms that live on HTTPS websites but transmit data outside of HTTPS. This puts the user’s sensitive data at risk of hackers, so Google will no longer offer autofill on them and will display an on-screen warning that the form is not secure.