What Google's Page Experience Update Means For Your Website

By Nathan Gawlik

Nathan Gawlik's experience includes being a General Manager of a Hampton Inn and other front line roles such as a Banquet Captain, Front Desk Agent, Housekeeper, Catering Event Manager, and Director of Sales.

Google is rolling out a new update starting in June 2021 that could affect how customers find your website. But don't worry! Here's an easy-to-understand guide about the update, what the changes mean and how to make your website optimization easier to manage.

When will the update be released?

Google began releasing their new Page Experience update piece by piece in mid-June. They plan to finish making changes by the end of August 2021.

This is the latest in a series of updates over the years aimed at improving search results and encouraging site owners to provide the best user experience, according to Search Engine Journal.

This newest set of changes is the latest update aimed at encouraging better website performance and searchability. Whether it's looking for pop culture trivia or important information, Google wants people searching the internet to have a good user experience. If your website loads faster and has helpful, searchable content, Google will place you higher in their search results.

However, according to some web design experts, you might not have to worry about hitting a perfect score in Google's evaluations. In fact, even some of Google's websites, like YouTube, don't have a high performance rating under their new standards.

What's in Google's Latest Update and How Does it Affect My Website?

Google's Page Experience update is focused on improving two areas: User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These things help your website's visitors find the information they're looking for easily and quickly. The website performance metrics Google is focused on in this update are listed below. Let's review them:

1. Large Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures the page load speed of your website. If your web page has a load time of 2.5 seconds, then Google considers that acceptable. How can you get your site to load faster? Large images, video files and complicated animations will tend to slow down your website, so one of the quickest and easiest things you can do is to make sure these elements aren't too large.

2. First Input Delay (FID): FID measures how fast visitors to your website can start to use it. If users can interact with your page within 100 milliseconds of it loading, then your FID is considered good. If page elements like buttons or navigation links are unresponsive and unusable as soon as they appear, then you may need to double check your website builder tools or consult a SEO expert.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the visual stability of your website. Nobody likes when clickable links, images and text move around, so the more stable they are the better. Like LCP, making sure files on your website aren't too large will help those clickable elements settle faster. In addition, removing aggressive pop-ups that block other buttons and content help increase your CLS score.

4. Google is also adjusting how they rank websites in search results based on new Search Engine Optimization guidelines that prioritize concise and useful content. For example, if you write lengthy intros or hide the answer people have searched for, Google might rank you lower than your competitors.

5. Google has also removed Accelerated Mobile Pages badge icons—small, grey lightning bolt icons—from search results. AMP content badges were previously awarded to websites to indicate great performance on mobile devices. However, analytics tool Plausible notes that many websites without AMP badges could perform better. So to avoid misrepresentation, Google removed the badges. (Image credit: Search Engine Journal)

How Does Google Want the User Experience to Change or Improve?

Google's new update will reward websites that have better performance scores. If your website loads quickly, responds well and doesn't move around too much, it'll rank higher than other websites with lower performance scores.

How is SEO Affected by the Google Page Experience Update?

Search Engine Optimization involves using highly-searched keywords on your website to attract people looking for answers to their questions. Google encourages striking a balance between giving people the information they want and not being too general.

While Google has always prioritized web pages with good SEO, they will now reward you for being clear, concise and answering your visitor's questions as quickly as possible.

What Is The Best Way to Check My Website's Performance?

Web performance scores can be affected by plenty of outside factors. Lots of visitors and heavy online server load can have a random, negative effect on website tests, so Google recently created Test My Site as a way to soothe the anxiety some may feel about getting their website performance just right.

Instead of weighing website owners down with a potential low score and a wall of jargon, Google assigns an easy to understand result for your website. They also provide links to more detailed information if you want to see how to make your web page even better.

After entering your website URL, Google will analyze your site and tell you if its performance is good or not based on 4G network speeds. It is highly recommended you use this tool if you just want to know if your website is performing at a passing rate.

What Other Tools Can I Use?

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a developer-focused tool on Google Chrome that will evaluate any website's mobile performance, SEO, accessibility and best practices. It's a little bit more tech-heavy, but can be a huge help in finding out how to improve your website.

Lighthouse will also suggest specific opportunities and areas for improvement, which can help you earn higher performance scores and a better search ranking. These suggestions will help refine your web page in small ways.

Here's how to access Lighthouse reports:

1. Right click on any website in your Google Chrome browser window.
2. Click "Inspect".
3. Click the ">>" at the top right of the window.
4. Click "Lighthouse.
5. To generate reports, select a category and click "Generate report"

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is another tool you can use to analyze your website's desktop performance. Getting your website's score is as simple as entering your URL. Like Lighthouse, this tool will show you opportunities to improve your website's performance score.

Page Experience Report

Google has also introduced a new Page Experience report tool within Google Search Console. This tool will evaluate your website's performance and provide even more helpful, detailed insights to improve your website. Like Lighthouse, these tips are directed towards web developers. However, it's important to know this tool currently only measures the mobile version of your website

How Can I Improve My Website's Speed?

As the update rolls out, Google recommends checking your website's performance scores regularly and making improvements as needed. Here are a few easy ways to improve your website's speed.

1. You should make sure both your desktop and mobile sites are snappy and responsive. A good place to start is checking the size and file type of images, videos and animations. PNGs will take up a lot of website memory, but JPEG files will be more efficient. Where possible, switching PNGs to JPEG can improve the load speed and responsiveness of your website.

2. Set defined sizes for visual elements to prevent any shifting and accidental clicks. Most of this can be done within your website builder. Mobile images should be cropped and resized to account for the smaller screen space, which will help them load faster and be less disruptive to visitors.

3. Google is also making signed exchanges available for any website. Enabling this element allows Google to save elements of your website, which can lower your Large Contentful Paint score and help your web page load faster.

4. Add alternative text—text describing the photo or illustration—to images and other visual elements of your website. This will make your page more accessible to people with disabilities and can also improve your search ranking.

How Can I Improve My Website's Content?

SEO can seem intimidating and confusing, but here are two easy ways to improve your website's searchability and content quality.

1. All content on your website should get to the point, according to Neil Patel. Storytelling is still great to include and can help readers relate to your writing, but Forbes notes Google will prioritize SEO-friendly web pages that answer the questions visitors are looking for. Let your personality and voice shine in your writing, but don't bury the answers people are looking for.

2. Use free analytics tools like Google Analytics or Moz to see how popular certain SEO terms are. By picking keywords with higher traffic, you can increase your search ranking. This will help bring more people to your website.

Even though the idea of a new update hurting your website can be scary, taking small steps to improve your website can keep you high in search rankings and accessible to potential visitors and customers.

In Summary

Many businesses are concerned about how the latest Google Page Experience Update's focus on page speed loading will impact their search ranking.

Google's latest update focuses on

1. If your web page has a load time of 2.5 seconds or less on a 4G network.

2. If users can quickly interact with your page elements after your web page loads

3. Making sure images and text are stable and not blocking content with aggressive pop-ups.

4. Google is also adjusting how they rank websites in search results based on Search Engine Optimization guidelines that prioritize concise and useful content.

Google recently created a useful tool to check the speed of your website called Test My Site. This tool gives a Good/Needs Improvement score to help businesses simply understand how Google views their website speed.

Even though the idea of a new update hurting your website can be scary, taking small steps to improve your website such as adjusting image size or enhancing content can keep you high in search rankings and accessible to potential visitors and customers.

Resources

History of Google Algorithm Updates
More Details Page Experience
Google PageSpeed Insight
Largest Contentful Paint
First Input Delay
Cumulative Layout Shift
Google AMP is Dead
Google AMP & SEO: Everything You Need to Know
Think with Google
Page Experience Report
Largest Contentful Paint
Signed Exchanges
How to Deal with the June Google Core Update
How Google's Page Experience Update Announcement Can Benefit SEO
Google Analytics
Free Domain SEO Metrics

MARKETING

OPERATIONS

CASE STUDIES

THEORY

MARKETING

OPERATIONS

CASE STUDIES

THEORY