What is Page Experience?
Google announced that the Google Page Experience update is scheduled to begin next May. That's almost a year after the upgrade was first revealed by the company and gives us another six months to prepare for it.
For ranking in search results, the update will take into account the planned user experience. "We're announcing today that in May 2021 the page experience signals in the ranking will roll out," Google said in the announcement.
Google can assess a series of signs in order to understand how a person will interpret the experience of a single web page. This involves signs such as how fast a website loads if it is mobile-friendly, operates on HTTPS, has distracting interstitials, and whether when the page loads, content bounces about.
Google Page Experience is an SEO-specific concept for a new metric being carried out by Google from a public perspective in 2021 to assess the usefulness of a website. It concentrates on the customer interface and how it can be optimized. Based on relevance, reputation, authenticity, and accessibility, global search engines are actively updating algorithms for rating websites. This aligns with the underlying mission statement of Google: "to organize knowledge about the planet and make it widely available and usable."
Google Priority for Ranking
There are hundreds of ranking variables on Google, which also fluctuate as changes are introduced and updated. Knowing which ones have a higher priority over others is helpful:
- Backlinks
- Freshness
- Topical Authority
- Search Intent
- Content Depth
- Site speed
- HTTPS Mobile-friendliness
- User Experience
- Content Accuracy
Although page or user interface has always been an essential aspect of assessing the importance and value of a website, page experience has become a new all-in-one ranking element, and a vital one that holds a lot of ranking weight. Google describes page experience as a collection of signals that quantify how users view the experience of communicating with a web page outside its pure value of knowledge." Thus the page experience ranking factor can penalize you if your website produces an experience that visitors hate.
Page Experience Signal Criteria
- Mobile-friendliness
- Page speed insights
- Safe Browsing
- HTTPS encryption security
- Visual layout stability
- Responsiveness
- No intrusive interstitials
Core Web Vitals
Google recently released Web Vitals, a compilation of metrics used exclusively for user interface assessment, and announced plans to upgrade the Main Web Vitals algorithm in 2021. It will join the analytics community that Page Experience will be part of. To measure key facets of the page experience, including tempo, responsiveness, and visual consistency, this new subset of user-centered metrics will be applied to existing metrics. The new Google page experience upgrade will now be revisited by Google.
Google recently released Web Vitals, a compilation of metrics used exclusively for user interface assessment, and announced plans to upgrade the Main Web Vitals algorithm in 2021. It will join the analytics community that Page Experience will be part of. To measure key facets of the page experience, including tempo, responsiveness, and visual consistency, this new subset of user-centered metrics will be applied to existing metrics. The latest page experience update from Google would also eliminate AMP as a prerequisite. AMP is a platform for web components that facilitates the development of websites.
This new SEO metric will evaluate user experience based on the following additional criteria:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance and speed. Ideal loading time is 2.5 seconds or less of a user landing on a page.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity of a web page. FID of 100 milliseconds or less is considered optimal.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CSL): Measures a website’s visual stability. A CLS score of less than 0.1 is the baseline for a good user experience.
By deepening commitment and optimizing responsiveness, many of the variables packaged in Core Site Vitals are meant to maximize market performance and customer interface. To respond to evolving user preferences and navigation patterns, Google is continuing to update the algorithm.
How to optimize for Page experience?
Page Experience ranking is not inherently a daunting job since most of the ranking variables are already pre-existing ones. With respect to optimization for Key Web Vitals, the problem is now. While they are new words, they are already used in significant aspects of the website that we customize for Site Pace, specifically. First Feedback Latency is under interactivity, and Combined Structure Change is under content consistency, both of which are already essential facets of a website. The Greatest Contentful Paint is under loading time.
The Page Experience update is not the only ranking aspect, of course. If page experience is the only facet you have optimized for, you can't increase your rating. Quality material and useful connections are still integral to having search results.
Finally, the page experience will modify how Google deals with the Top Stories portion of the search results. One of the main reasons publishers attract traffic is that AMP would no longer be a prerequisite to be included in the Top Stories. But I strongly recommend that publishers still stick to publishing AMP sites as they are more helpful to consumers and give the website users a much better experience.
