Page Experience — a new ranking signal in Google

Back in November 2020 Google announced that a new ranking factor would come into force by the end of May 2021. They called it Page Experience. What is this update about, and how do you bring your site in line with the new requirements?

What changes with the arrival of Page Experience?

The latest expected update to Google's algorithms includes several new signals for ranking in the search engine. To improve a site's chances of reaching the top of Google, every URL has to be set up with these factors in mind.

The purpose of Page Experience is to bring sites that offer quality service and a positive user experience to the top of Google's results.

Page Experience is measured by five main signals.

Relevant, quality content still matters. But alongside it the role of convenience grows: loading speed, ease of moving around the site and so on. Why so? Google has an interest in a site being convenient, not merely filled with good content.

You could say Google is trying to even out the weight of content and of page convenience.

Which five signals should you optimise for a better Page Experience?

Some of the signals we will discuss are entirely new. Other factors existed before.

Core Web Vitals — speed and ease of interaction

This parameter is in turn split into three signals:

1. LCP — Largest Contentful Paint;
2. FID — First Input Delay;
3. CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift.

These three figures describe how quickly a visitor can interact with a page. Let us go through what each of them does.

LCP

The Largest Contentful Paint metric shows the time needed for the largest element of a page to be fully displayed in the viewport. The LCP element is almost always at the top of the page, and until it loads you will see practically nothing.

CLS

Describes how quickly a page becomes visually stable. You have certainly run into pages whose elements creep over one another while loading: try to click a button and you may land on an advertising banner or even end up on another page of the site. Google's new requirements are meant to spare visitors such problems.

FID

The time needed for the browser to respond correctly to an interaction with the page. A visitor should not notice a delay between clicking a button and the site reacting. If you make visitors wait, or repeat the same action several times, they are more likely to leave and not come back.

Mobile friendliness

This is a general assessment of how convenient a site is on mobile devices. The parameter is not new, but it is important to keep in mind if for some reason you have not optimised a site for mobile or are launching a new project. Be sure to choose a responsive theme and test how the site renders on different screens.

The Mobile Usability tool in Google Search Console will do it.

Safe browsing

A new metric that signals to Google that a site carries no dangerous content, no malicious or dubious code, no content aimed at deception and nothing else of that kind.

You can check your site's safety with the Safe Browsing site status tool. Simply paste the site address into the service's box and click scan.

A secure connection

Visitors care more and more about the security of their data. They simply will not buy from, or leave messages on, sites that do not protect it. So an https connection is crucially important for a good Page Experience.

Host4Biz clients can order paid SSL certificates or get a free one. Write to our support team for the details.

No to intrusive pop-ups

If you still have pop-up windows on your site, remove them as quickly as you can. Google started demoting pages with pop-ups back in 2017. You may have seen sites of large companies or well-known figures with pop-ups, but they have brand traffic, which is why such resources still get plenty of visitors.

Do not close off visitors' access to your content. Google will notice and lower the site's positions in the results.

Which matters more, content or Page Experience?

Any innovation makes SEO specialists and webmasters think about changing their strategy and their priorities. Many specialists are now asking which will matter more to Google: content or Page Experience?

Content will still take priority, because Google was and remains a tool for obtaining information. Which means a site's semantics, and optimising pages for search queries and user intent, deserve just as much attention.

But a visitor should not run into difficulties while looking at that content, and that is exactly what the Page Experience signals were built for. So if Google is ranking two sites with content of equal quality, priority goes to the resource with the better Page Experience figures — and a very small difference can play the decisive role.

Summary

Google has not yet said how each of the signals will weigh, whether they will count equally or whether some of them will affect PE more strongly. So we recommend paying attention to all five components of the new ranking factor.

Page Experience is also affected by a site's loading speed, and that depends not only on the site but on the hosting. Host4Biz will store your site reliably on fast SSD NVMe drives.