Yesterday I suggested that ignoring Google’s forthcoming ‘Page Experience Update’ will be a risk too far for most of us. So what is it, and what should we do about it?
The Search Engine Land website reports that page experience “is made up of several existing Google search ranking factors, including the Mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, the intrusive interstitials penalty and safe browsing penalty, while refining metrics around speed and usability. These refinements are under what Google calls Core Web Vitals.”
These then are the things we all have to get right. Speed is key, particularly the time between the start of a page load and when significant content appears, and the amount of time it takes for a page to be ready for user interactivity. We also need to reduce the amount that our pages shuffle around and reformat themselves as the content assembles. It’s all about good design and good coding.
It’s technical – possibly very technical. But use some of the better speed tools around and compare your site’s performance with its rivals in the Google results. This might give you an idea of how much work there is to do. In many cases, this could be the tipping point which gets you to commission that partial site redesign you’ve been promising yourself. That’s not a full redesign that requires a content rewrite; it’s replacing the look and feel of the site, and the back end, while retaining the content. This can be a far less daunting and expensive task, and may be achievable in a short timescale. But it needs a designer that really understands the technical side of web design.