All You Need To Know About “Google’s Page Experience Update”

The Global Pandemic Hit of 2020 has affected nearly every aspect of our life. Since the time of the ‘Dawn of online business’ digital marketing has been serving the marketing industry as a strong point and now it plays the role of a very powerful asset and it’s crucial for businesses to grow and maintain their customer base.

For the past few years, we know how search engines like “Google” have been remarkable in its evolution. Every update announced by Google in the ranking algorithms helps digital marketers to generate leads for their businesses most ethically and efficiently possible. That’s right, its a fairly lucrative platform for modern business!

As the year 2020 arrived, Google thrived to maintain its | Quality > Everything | approach by announcing a ‘ New Ranking Algorithm’ designed to provide the users an even better and competent “Page Experience”. The new update called “Page Experience Update” will be live in the year 2021, so marketers have enough time to prepare for its arrival.

What does the update consist of?

This new ranking algorithm will include ‘core web vitals’ that are user-centered metrics, that give scores on the aspect of your page’s minute performances. Now, this sounds like something John Wooden once said, “It’s the little details that are vital” Giving attention to details like load time, interactivity, and the stability of the content as it loads while optimizing your website, will become very beneficial for your business and this update is just the right way to do it. So let’s unpack the metrics of the “Core Web Vitals”

The three new metric signals are-

Perceived Load Speed

Largest contentful paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes from initiating a page to load till the time when the largest image or text block can be seen on the screen. For a better ranking, the page load must happen under 2.5 seconds.

Ready For Interaction

First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time it takes for the browser to respond to a user’s first interaction with the page. Sites should aim for an FID less than 100 milliseconds.

Visual Stability

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the unexpected movement of the page content. Abrupt content may frustrate the readers and force them to move the content of interest out of view. You should aim for a CLS score of less than 0.1.

You must be wondering how do you prepare for this update to enhance your site’s SEO.As you already know, SEO consists of several factors that help improve the website but one of the most important factors that will ensure high performance and ROI of your website is “Page Speed”.

From a user experience standpoint, a faster website is practically a requirement as 67% of users demand a loading time of 3 seconds or less. Speed of your web pages is an important ranking factor for SEO and significantly helps you gain user’s loyalty and goodwill. So, let’s start our preparation by increasing the ‘Page Speed’.

Metrix you should keep in mind during the analysis:

How to Increase Page Speed? Here are some effective tips:

1) Make use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):

2) Implement the Rich Snippets/Schema.org Markup:

• Paste the URL of your selected content in the workspace that will be provided to you in the mark-up tool section.
• Once the content of your selected web page appears then you can highlight the elements of the content which you want to mark-up.
• After adding mark-up items of your choice, you may now create an HTML and add your schema mark-up to your web page by using CMS or source code of your website.

After this, You have to patiently wait for Google to recognize your mark-up items and feature them on the result pages. You probably have heard or implemented schema already to your site and sure it makes your website appear in SERPs that enhance your possibility to gain more CTRs and proven to be beneficial but ever wondered how much time it takes to start seeing genuine results after implementing schema?

Google’s response to the introduction of the structured data mark-up on your site:

• Google starts analyzing the new mark-up only 14 days after it’s the introduction to your website.
• If everything is correct Google will start showing rich snippets for some pages but after 5 days these will disappear.
• Several Days later these rich snippets will reappear - either for the same pages or a new set. This may be repeated several times.
• Only after 8 weeks, you will be rewarded with semi-permanent rich snippets throughout your pages, unless any errors are discovered.

3) Enable File Compression:

4) Optimize images:

5) Improve Server Response Time:

ii) Select and optimize your web server: Make sure you choose the right web server like Apache, Nginx, or OpenLiteSpeed, and once you have chosen a web server to use you’ll need to set it up and optimize the configuration according to your will.

iii) Reduce Bloat: While using a content management system (CMS) your site will accumulate bloat unless carefully managed. Things like Images, new content pages, etc will slow down the speed of your site and it is necessary to optimize the images, combine your resources and enable compression since smaller files are preferable when it comes to lowering SRTs.

iv) Optimize your Database: You can speed up the loading time for your site as a whole by ensuring your database will retrieve data as efficiently as possible.Slow queries are the number one reason why a server responds to a request slowly, so identify ways to prevent bottlenecks.

6) Use a content distribution network:

7) Utilize Browser Caching: