Google Page Experience Update – Everything You Need to Know

Running a business is challenging, and part of that challenge includes getting your marketing right, ensuring your company has a clear direction of where you want to focus. 

Suppose your marketing strategy is built around SEO (search engine optimisation). In that case, you’ll know the importance of appearing high up in Google search rankings.

Recently, Google announced a significant change to how this is going to work that is likely to impact most search results. 

On May 28th 2020, Google announced that as of mid-June 2021, they’d be implementing a significant addition to their search algorithm ranking signals, with the final rollout completed by August 2021.

Google calls this the Google Page Experience Update.  

Why is this important? Because all businesses rely heavily on SEO and given that Google has 92.2% of the search engine market share worldwide, this change will probably impact your business. 

If you want to ensure your business doesn’t disappear when customers and prospects look for what you provide, keep reading. 

What is The Page Experience?

In short, it’s a metric that Google uses to measure your website’s usability from the user’s perspective. The metric focuses on the user experience with your website and how to optimise that experience. 

Google describes it as measuring “how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web.”

Remember that all significant search engines such as Google and Bing constantly update their algorithms for ranking websites based on their usability, relevance to the search, credibility, etc.

Pages with a higher “pass” rate from Google will appear higher up in the search rankings. 

So, to protect your website’s page rankings on Google, you’re going to need to ensure the following Google ranking factors are up to speed:

The Core Web Vitals

This relates to how fast your website pages load, how responsive they are and how stable your pages are.

Core web vitals include:

Largest Contentful Paint: how long it takes for your site’s images/videos/text to load when a user clicks on your website via Google. It should be no more than 2.5 seconds.

First Input Delay: The length of time between when a user performs an action on your site and your browser responding. Google recommends it’s no more than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift: When a user clicks a button on your site but suddenly moves, they find themselves looking at an ad instead. Google recommends CLS is 0.1 or lower.

Mobile Usability

Searches using mobiles have steadily increased from 2015. In the first quarter of 2021, 54.8% of global website searches were generated by mobile traffic, compared to 31.16% in 2015.

Suppose your website isn’t mobile-friendly, and users have to pinch the screen to minimise and see the text.

In that case, Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report will mark your website as “failing” in the Google Page Experience Update report.  

Secure Browsing

Website users want to feel that browsing isn’t going to cause them any security/data breach issues.

Your website will be ranked by Google in terms of whether it has any malware or deceptive content, and this, in turn, will decrease your rankings.

If your site offers safe and secure browsing, Google will consider providing a good page experience. 

The Ad Experience

If you run ads on your website, including popups, this area may need some attention.

For example, if you run popup ads that users see the minute they access your site, either on a laptop or mobile, this could potentially harm your page experience status. 

Google allows you to test your site’s ad experience status. This is also an area that Google considers in the Page Experience report.

If Google flags that website users have a negative ad experience on any of your pages, all your website’s pages will be deemed to have a horrible page experience. 

HTTPS Usage

Google will look at the ratio of pages on your website that use HTTP vs HTTPS. If the HTTPS figure is too high, Google will show you an HTTPS warning on your Google Page Experience report.

A warning banner will also appear on your website. Users should see a closed padlock in the URL bar of your website on all your pages. 

Having a user-friendly website where the design comes with an SSL certificate is the easiest way around this potential issue. 

High-Quality Content

So far, so good. However, you also need to provide your customers and potential customers with top-quality content relevant, interesting and easy to interact with. 

Your content should be visually appealing, up-to-date and functional. This helps increase your chances of attracting and retaining your target audience because they feel they’re getting tremendous value. 

One way of doing this is to have a blog. It’s an effective way of your brand communicating with its audience while building trust, resulting in more leads and potential sales. 

Do You Want to Learn More About the Google Page Experience Update?

Having read this blog post, we hope that you now have a better idea about the Google page experience and how it will impact your company. 

To ensure your business isn’t penalised by the Google page experience update and to find out precisely what to do to your website to avoid this potential pitfall, contact us.

We’ll also happily advise you on any other updates that could improve your website experience. Speak soon!