Google has officially rolled out its page experience update as of mid-June 2021. Along with it comes the newest metrics, Core Web Vitals. In this episode, we unpack what this update means for your business, why you should care, and more importantly what you can do to optimize your site for CWV. We also shared the exact steps on how we achieved a 90+ page speed score for mobile.
Links in this episode:
- https://www.nohacksmarketing.com/blog/do-core-web-vitals-matter/
- https://www.nohacksmarketing.com/blog/core-web-vitals-wordpress/
- https://www.nohacksmarketing.com/podcast/012-how-to-prepare-your-e-commerce-website-for-core-web-vitals/
- https://www.nohacksmarketing.com/podcast/core-web-vitals/
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Episode Notes
What should you experience from Google’s latest Page Experience update?
- The AMP badge will start to go away
- Google will continue testing a possible Page Experience badge
- Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will include news content
However, keep in mind that the Page Experience update is unrelated from Google’s June 2021 Core update.
About Google “Page Experience Update”
According to Google, the Page Experience Update rollout will happen slowly until the end of August 2021.
As Google’s John Mueller repeatedly said, this is not going to be a key ranking signal so don’t expect much change. Don’t just put all your eggs into the corporate bios basket because you’re not going to get anything out of it. Instead, focus on everything else that you should have been doing until this point.
However, you should do it fast because if it’s a tiebreaker between you and your competitor, you can win this.
So going back to the update. Apart from the core web vitals, a new metric AMP badge will begin to go away.
AMP is sort of losing its significance because of Google’s effort to make the web faster and make it easier for Google to crawl and display content instantly. If they’re forcing everyone to be fast, then AMP is not necessary. In addition, it was just Google trying to force everyone to do things in a certain way.
Carousel features on Google search will be updated to include all news content if it meets the Google News content policies and guidelines.
The other things that they didn’t directly announce are HTTPS, mobile-friendly, safe browsing, and non-intrusive interstitials will most likely be part of this rollout. That’s because they’ve been ranking signals before the announcement. Plus, all those experiences led to a better user experience.
Why Google Cares About Your Web Page Experience
People who use Google search and then come to your website may become your audience and eventually, they might become your users. But since they’re originally Google’s users, Google and its search engine don’t want to send people to have an unpleasant experience.
Let’s say you have 10 blue links from the google search results page. You click the first link, it’s slow, then you move on to the second link and it’s still slow or not loading. Then you keep on clicking the rest of the links and they’re all the same.
DuckDuckGo and Bing will let you try something else for a search result. Google doesn’t want to do it.
What Google does is they don’t want to risk it; they will keep on showing the best result.
Another thing about Google is that if you render quickly, LCP and its responsiveness doesn’t shift. This makes it easier for Google to crawl your website and spend fewer resources, less time, and money to do so.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google has introduced in May 2020. They are now officially part of the search-engine giant’s ranking signals.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This metric reports the render time of the largest text block or image that you can see within the viewport, relative to when the page begins to load.
- First Input Delay. This measures the loading interactivity of the page. So as the page is loading, you’re going to want to interact with it.
- Cumulative Layout Shift. It’s the one that measures the largest burst of session windows for every unexpected layout shift that happens during the whole lifespan of a web page.
The Perception of Speed
The Perception of Speed is something that these three metrics are trying to address. However, it is not the speed itself.
You can still have a huge page that prioritizes lazy loads and you can still have a very high score. You can work on a page that’s lean and it doesn’t need to have a lot of weight. But the problem is it might not load correctly. There might be a lot of blocking CSS, render-blocking JavaScript, and that’s what the core vitals are trying to address.
If it’s your first time hearing about core web vitals, the first thing that you need to do is go to Google’s Page Speed Insights, enter your domain there, and check your scores. It will tell you your exact scores, current scores for the core web vitals, and give you recommendations on how you can fix the issue.
Moreover, the Page Experience and Core Web Vitals are not site-wide metrics. They are applied to individual pages, so your website can have a hundred fast pages. What it means is that if I have an important page, that’s the thing I should prioritize and check.
Content Still Reigns
Content still reigns. That’s because even if you load your page quickly but all your content is thin or not answering the query, then it’s pointless. Google still says that content is still higher in terms of having a positive impact on your ranking on searches.
If you can have great valuable content and optimize for page experience, then that’s what you should provide your users. You must do that because someone else might do that. That’s the thin line between you and your competitor.
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