Page Experience Update

The Objective of Page Experience Update

• The goal of the page experience update is to improve the overall web-browsing experience

Why should SEOs care about this update?

• Once this update will be completely rolled out, the User Experience will become a direct ranking factor (mentioned by Google)

What exactly is the Page Experience Update?

There are certain factors that constitute the Page Experience for a user:

• Core Web Vitals
• Mobile Friendliness
• Safe Browsing
• Http/Https
• No Intrusive Interstitials

Core Web Vitals:

• Core Web Vitals is much more than simply the page speed of the website
• It is more about the interactive and visual stability of the website
• It takes three main factors into consideration, Largest Contentful Paint(LCP), First Input Delay(FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• LCP mainly measures how fast the content gets rendered on the page since it first started loading
• FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction
• CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of a page
• Layout shift can be simply understood as https://storage.googleapis.com/web-dev-assets/layout-instability-api/layout-instability2.webm

Mobile Friendliness:

• From using AMP Pages to making text mobile compatible, Mobile Friendliness encompasses everything that makes the web more Mobile Usable

Safe Browsing:

• By safe browsing, Google is emphasizing more on making the web a more secure place
• It is more strict on Websites that contain deceptive content or may contain unwanted malware 

HTTPS:

• Google has been focusing on protecting the integrity and confidentiality of user’s data and that’s the reason it has now made HTTPS a part of its Page Experience Update
• Site’s with an SSL certificate will now have a boost over site’s without SSL i.e. HTTP

No Intrusive Interstitials:

• As Google mentioned in the Jan 2017 Update, “pages, where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results, may not rank as high.”
• Content must be easily accessible to the users
• There should not be a popup that covers the main content
• There should be no standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content

How you can optmize for this update?

• Make your website responsive and mobile-friendly
• For optimizing for core web vitals, check out this article that I wrote back in Jan 2021
• Implement SSL on your website to ensure the safety of the user as well as the website
• Avoid popup that covers the main content, the pages must be easy to access

Some Useful Links:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/page-experience

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/11/timing-for-page-experience

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/security/overview

https://web.dev/lcp/

https://web.dev/cls/

https://web.dev/fid/

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/security/https