Google’s digital experience score

How do we measure a “good” website?

Google’s digital experience assessment measures the quality of any site from the customer’s perspective.

It’s not easy to say what makes a website “good”. People have had different opinions over the years — after all, your definition of quality depends on who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. In the world of development, we’ve often focused on basic page speed, meaning the time it takes to load every component of a web page, down to the fine print in the footer that nobody sees. However, we’re now starting to pay more attention to how fast and useful a page feels to the person on the other end.?

Often, what makes something good is both obvious and timeless. When asked what's going to change in the future, Jeff Bezos’ response is that the real question is what won't change. Customers won't ask for a buggier site, or higher prices, or slower shipping. You want pages to load without making you wait. You want pricing to be upfront. You want the whole experience to just work.

In 2021, Google introduced three criteria to measure if your website is fast, stable, and responsive enough to give your visitors a good digital experience (the criteria are called Core Web Vitals, and if you want to get into the technical details, you can read all about them in the top section of this guide). These are intended to assess the webpage from the perspective of the person trying to access, explore, and interact with a site. Google now uses these criteria to help determine where you land in search results, but that’s not all. They also have a big influence on customer behaviour. A good score can improve your search ranking, but can also improve money-making website metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate. Better scores are better business.

So it’s a bit of a surprise that most of NZ’s biggest e-commerce sites —? including The Warehouse and Countdown — don’t pass Google’s threshold for “Good” experience.

Why aren’t the major brands passing?

Well, first of all, this isn’t limited to Kiwi brands; in March, an assessment of 1.8M prominent URLs found that only 38% were passing all three of Google’s criteria. In fact, a larger and more complex business doesn’t necessarily have an advantage, because they’re likely to have more functions and dependencies on their websites. So while a user can do more, the extra features also slow everything down and detract from the overall experience — simple sites are often the fastest and most consistent.

Passing Google’s standards is challenging for even the most successful global businesses. But they’re also undeniably critical as user expectations rise and attention spans get shorter.

How important is it really?

Scoring highly on customer experience pays off in two distinct ways. As I said, performing well helps you show up early and often in Google search results. But these criteria also just help you to understand how decent your website is, and show you a clear pathway for delivering a faster-feeling, high-performing site that attracts and delights customers. If you ignore these scores, you’re effectively leaving money on the table — and your competitors are only too happy to scoop it up.

The bad news is that if you’re a shopping site, it might be particularly difficult to do well on customer experience. This category tends to heavily feature images, videos, links to social media, and embedded third-party content, which can easily slow things down.?

The good news is that there’s a range of good habits that you can pick up to minimize lags and interruptions.

How do I take action?

The first thing you need to do is work out where you’re starting from. After all, your scores might already be pretty good! You can use PageSpeed Insights, a free tool from Google, to instantly see the performance of your site. This will also give you a list of “opportunities” which you can work through to optimize your scores. Some of these are pretty technical and require a bit of effort and expertise, but some are as easy as changing the file format of your images. Even just grabbing those low-hanging fruit can make a difference.

From there, you’ll need other tools to diagnose, test, and monitor your customer experience scores on an ongoing basis. Google recommends a workflow that uses PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and a Real User Monitoring (RUM) tool. Learn more about testing with Lighthouse here, and detection and monitoring with RUM here.

To get a complete overview of the technical background, the potential business benefits, and the practical implementation of these scores, the team at Raygun has put together a comprehensive guide to Core Web Vitals for business leaders, which you can download for free.

That’s enough technical information for one day. If you have follow-up questions or want to hear about a topic that’s a little more exciting, I do take requests. Fire your questions or ideas straight to my inbox at [email protected] or via InMail.

Read the original version of this article over at Supermarket News.