Google Page Experience - one year on
It has almost been a year since, Google introduced new Page Experience measurements into their algorithm for site ranking.
How does Google measure the Page Experience of your site?
It measures the overall experience a user has while interacting with a page on your site. Google has published the signals for great page experience, which includes the three new Core Web Vitals and four Existing measures. The Core Web Vitals were newly introduced in May 2022, while the other four criteria already played a role in how your site is ranked. Google also test and highlight pages in their search results that have great page experience.
Have you addressed the following new areas on your website.
Loading - Largest contentful paint measures how long the largest content elements on your side take to load. Target should be below 2.5 seconds.
Interactivity - First input delay that shows how long it takes until a user can interact with elements on your site. Guideline is that it should be below 100 millisecond.
Visual Stability - Cumulative Layout Shift signals how long until elements are in their final position on your pages. The goal here should be to get it below 0.1.
And how are you maintaining the following areas?
Mobile Friendliness - Measures if your site is fully mobile responsive and mobile friendly.
Safe Browsing - Checking if your site contains any spamware, deceptive content or any other security issues.
Using HTTPS protocols - Your site should have an SSL certificate.
No Intrusive Interstitials - Ensuring that the main content is easily accessible to the user.
When should you start making changes?
We recommend that you start making changes as soon as possible. Obviously, implementing improvements can be time consuming, it can include a few rounds of changes and more importantly once it's all done, it can take up to 28 days for Google to verify the changes and improvements.
Anything else that you should be thinking about?
Of course the content on your site remains the most important factor for ranking, so you should aim for providing the best information possible. However, when Google sees multiple pages (from different websites) with similar content, it will rank the sites higher that have a better Page Experience score.
What do you do now to improve your Google Page Experience score? Contact us for a free site review.
