Page Experience in Google Search results
The usability of your website speaks volumes about the type of experience you offer to customers. A smooth user experience gives a positive impression on users and immediately reflects on higher customer satisfaction.
What is the new Page experience?
Google’s new algorithm update for page experience is a signal that measures how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. It focuses on making websites evolve towards user expectations on mobile and optimizing factors that made the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces. This ensures business success on the web as users become engaged and transact with less friction.
The new algorithm is keen on ensuring that users do not face hassles and are not driven to the point of taking action that is desirable for the business due to a sheer accident. For example, take a user who is visiting an e-commerce website and adding items to the shopping cart. He happens to change his mind and decides to leave the site when a prompt to abandon the cart or proceed to the checkout option pops up. He/she proceeds to click the abandon the cart option, but just as he is about to click on it, the cursor automatically moves to the proceed to checkout button, and the user clicks on it inadvertently.
Websites that offer such experiences are usually a big hassle for users, so Google’s update ensures that such troublesome sites do not rank at the top of the search results. The most important catch is that this new page experience update ranks websites on the basis of their user-friendly nature.
Six signals in new page experience ranking factor
There are three important metrics that influence ranking in new page experience. Perform a quick check on the user experience using these three metrics.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)– You can measure the loading performance and providing a good user experience to users. LCP has to occur 2.5 seconds of when the page begins loading.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)– Measure the visual stability of your page with CLS. Make sure that your page maintains a CLS of 0.1 or less for optimum visual stability.
- First Input Delay (FID) – You can measure the nature of the interaction of your website with FID. Ensure that your pages have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
LCP, FID and CLS are three vital metrics that help you gauge your page experience and remain on top of the search results. Make sure that you adhere to the recommended target for most users. The recommended targets have to be met at the 75th percentile for all three metrics.
Prepare your Website for the Google Page Experience update
Stay on track with the latest Google Page experience update by adhering to these simple rules.
Another important part is that users need to be assured that they are visiting a secure website. With increasing malware attacks and safe-browsing issues, check whether your website is vulnerable to attacks through security issues report and other relevant tools online.
- HTTPS: Secure your website with HTTPS for an added layer of security and establish a secure site connection.
- Alt text on images: Apply alt text on your images to ensure a better user experience and earn both explicit and implicit SEO benefits, this contributes to image SEO.
- AMP: Accelerate your webpage load time with Accelerating Mobile Pages (AMP), which is an open-source framework designed to speed up the load time of mobile internet users.
- Mobile friendly: Make sure that your web pages are optimized to remain mobile-friendly as most internet users rely on mobile devices. Take a mobile-friendly of your website that helps you to stay on track.
- CTA button: Add relevant call to action buttons and direct users to your latest content or a registration page. Guide users, help them navigate better, and get closer to achieving your conversion goals.
- Safe browsing: With increasing malware attacks and safe-browsing issues, check whether your website is vulnerable to attacks through security issues report and other relevant tools online.
How Page Experience affects your website?
Google understands the hardships faced by users while performing online purchase or other operations. Certain businesses use clever tactics and practices that help them gain clicks and drive conversions.
The page experience algorithm puts a full stop to such practices by ranking pages that users love the most. Google clearly emphasizes the change of the page experience in its algorithm that is focussed on a page-level basis. If many pages on your website provide a great engaging user experience compared to your competition, Google is bound to rank your website higher in the search results.
Businesses with websites that have a poor user experience have to bucker up and leverage methods to improve the UI and reduce bugs on your website. Emulate designs and UX from renowned businesses known for high customer satisfaction and translate them into a unique UI tailored to fit the business requirements.
GTmetrix: How fast does your website load?
One of the prime reasons for a high bounce rate and poor lead generation is slow loading. Make sure that your website loads faster to ensure a fluid user experience and increased customer satisfaction. GTmetrix ensures that your website loads quickly, gauges its performance, and optimizes website performance, and ensures increased speed.
For an online business to run efficiently, the website has to remain fast and fluid from any location. GTmetrix tests your webpage in different countries, browsers, and connection speeds to ensure consistency. It is often difficult to trace the reason why a website is slow or inconsistent in performance. GTmetrix breaks down the performance of a webpage and summarizes it through a thorough assessment.
Businesses can also track the website performance through scheduled testing and get notified whenever the page is slow. They can also get a better idea of how a webpage loads on different devices and how the performance is at different parts of the world. GTmetrix enables businesses to analyze the performance of a webpage under different conditions, geographic locations and suggests optimizations that help reduce setbacks to a great extent.
Hey! Guess what? It has been postponed
The new update for Google’s page experience update was scheduled to be launched in May 2021 but has been postponed to be launched between mid-June and the end of August. Small items such as have already been launched as some in mid-June and some in August. This includes a new page experience report in the Google search console and signed exchanges for all web pages.
Towards the mid of June, Google page experience update would roll out slowly. Also, Google would continue to test a page experience/core web vital label with no decision being made.
By the end of August, the Google page experience update would be live, with AMP no longer being a requirement for eligibility for top stories carousel being live. With nearly a month left, we will help optimize your website immediately and ensure that you stay ahead of competitors.
