Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond the content on the page and both on mobile and desktop devices. It is crucial for SEO.
Page experience includes Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. It also includes existing Search signals: mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
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, safe browsing penalty, while refining metrics around speed and usability. These refinements are under what Google calls Core Web Vitals. However, Google dropped the safe browsing factor in August last year from the page experience update.
Understanding how your website stacks up against Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmarks is a good first step in adapting your SEO strategy to the page experience update. This information can be found in your Google Search Console, under the “Experience” tab. Here, there will be a breakdown of mobile and desktop URLs into three categories: “good” URLs that meet Google’s benchmarks, “fair” URLs that need improvement, and “poor” URLs that are way beyond the established standards. By taking note of these page experience scores, you can assess whether or not your site is meeting the three Core Web Vitals metrics.
SEO Tips – Improving Page Experience
- Work on Your Loading Speed. Ensure pain content loads first. Choose a fast web host. Optimise Javascript/CSS images and fonts and use a lazy loader
- Work on Your Layout Shift. Specify the height and width of images, load content from top to bottom, and never insert content above what’s already been loaded.
- Mobile-friendliness. Use this tool provided by Google to test the mobile-friendliness of your website
- Safe browsing – Google will flag any issues you may have via Google Search Console, so ensure you check that regularly
- Secure browsing. Ensure your pages all have https. Use this tool to troubleshoot any security issues
- No intrusive interstitials – for example, large pop-ups that ask you to sign up for something. Or any content that blocks the main content and needs to be closed before consuming the content. Simply don’t use them, they provide a negative user experience and Google will downgrade your site if you do.
We hope these tips are useful. If you have more questions let us know.
