If you’ve seen movements in your Google search rankings this month, it may be down to the ‘Page Experience’ update having been rolled out to desktop search. This was first flagged up over 18 months ago and regular readers will be well aware of what’s required.
Google Search Console now reports directly on how we’re doing on the Page Experience criteria, and it’s essential to see what it says. Here’s a report on a site where I’ve been working very hard to meet the standards. I still couldn’t quite get 100%, but when I investigated the page which was highlighted, I could see that it had a large table which clearly wouldn’t collapse nicely on mobile devices, so fair play to Google.
If you’ve still got poor Page Experience scores, you definitely need to do something about it, and quickly. Other sites that do better will get a boost in the search results, possibly leading them to overtake you.
The Core Web Vitals report (also in Search Console) will let you see how your pages are performing for each metric. Alternatively you can test pages in tools such as PageSpeed Insights; there’s even an extension for the Chrome browser to do this.