Are you ready for Google’s ‘page experience’ update?

For the first time, Google is about to start rank­ing web pages not only by how use­ful their con­tent is, but also by how they per­form when being viewed. 

The search engine’s so-called core web vitals (CWV) update will reward pages that down­load quick­ly and are steady and respon­sive as they do so. If items on a page move around as they mate­ri­alise, increas­ing the risk of a false click on an advert, say, the new algo­rithm will take a dim view. Hav­ing links that are instant­ly respon­sive when they show up on screen will also be a key cri­te­ri­on for a high rank­ing. 

The update ref­er­ences all the ‘page expe­ri­ence’ attrib­ut­es a site must pos­sess to sat­is­fy the search engine. This was orig­i­nal­ly due to start apply­ing in May but has been post­poned to June, with a full imple­men­ta­tion due by the end of August. 

The rea­son for the delay could well be a lack of aware­ness among web­site man­agers. When search agency Search­metrics analysed 2 mil­lion sites, it found that 96% offered a page expe­ri­ence that would fall short of Google’s forth­com­ing bench­mark.

Jonathan Hop­per, CEO of Gar­ring­ton Prop­er­ty Find­ers, is not sur­prised. He believes that many com­pa­nies are “asleep at the mar­ket­ing wheel” and under­es­ti­mat­ing the impact of the update. 

“Busi­ness­es should be approach­ing this with a good dose of fear and a sense of oppor­tu­ni­ty,” argues Hop­per, who has been study­ing the update’s impli­ca­tions. He believes that a good start­ing point for web­site man­agers would be to focus on the part of the page that view­ers don’t see until they start scrolling.

“To defend our top posi­tions in search, we at Gar­ring­ton have worked hard at speed­ing up the per­for­mance of our site by com­press­ing pic­tures and also by bring­ing in ‘lazy load­ing’. This allows the part of the page on view to be pri­ori­tised, with pic­tures below the fold load­ing only as a view­er scrolls down to them,” Hop­per says. “This means that a page appears much faster on screen, because it’s not wait­ing for unseen con­tent to down­load.”

Smarter coding for pictures

Find­ing the fastest way for pic­tures to down­load is a com­mon con­cern for busi­ness­es deal­ing with the CWV update. Patrick Heath, CTO of expe­ri­ence-days provider Fizzbox, reveals that he has been tread­ing a fine line in this respect. 

His firm’s web­site needs to be rich in con­tent, fea­tur­ing lots of high-qual­i­ty pho­tos to con­vey the joy of the events on sale, but it must also be easy to down­load. The answer, he says, is to change the site’s cod­ing to make images appear on the screen more quick­ly and with­out shift­ing. That entails pro­gram­ming in the size of pic­tures, so that brows­er soft­ware “knows” how much space to leave for them on the page as a place­hold­er. This pre­vents items on the page from sud­den­ly shift­ing mid­way through the down­load. 

Fizzbox is also cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent-sized ver­sions of pic­tures for mobile and desk­top brows­ing, so that smart­phones are no longer oblig­ed to down­load large image files – an espe­cial­ly frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence for users on a low-band­width mobile con­nec­tion. 

Heath rec­om­mends look­ing through web­site code to elim­i­nate any pro­gram­ming errors that might be mak­ing the pages slow­er to load than they need to be. 

“It’s a real bal­anc­ing act, but there’s much that com­pa­nies can do sim­ply by not being lazy,” he says. “We’ve gone back to best-prac­tice meth­ods.”

Ener­gy busi­ness E.ON has been going through sim­i­lar process­es with its web­site. The company’s head of search-engine opti­mi­sa­tion, Sascha Otto, says it has been work­ing hard to ensure that image files are com­pressed as much as pos­si­ble, so that they down­load quick­ly. It has also exam­ined the way its pages were pro­grammed to ensure that the con­tents of each page don’t shift around.

“We’ve had to look at the pro­gram­ming to ensure that the nav­i­ga­tion icons on a page stay in the same place when it down­loads,” he says. “We noticed that they could change posi­tion, which was not good. We also took a long, hard look at the cod­ing to see if it was all nec­es­sary. We stripped out those lit­tle pieces of script that had been insert­ed over the years that weren’t strict­ly nec­es­sary but would like­ly hold us back.”

Customer focus is rewarding

Although the changes required may seem daunt­ing, they are serv­ing as a wake-up call to busi­ness­es to con­sid­er their web­sites as more than a repos­i­to­ry of per­sua­sive mar­ket­ing mate­r­i­al. 

Finan­cial soft­ware provider Finas­tra is anoth­er firm that’s applied lazy load­ing in its bid to sat­is­fy Google’s upcom­ing algo­rith­mic alter­ation. But it has also made some cru­cial tweaks to set­tings on its con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that would have been over­looked if its SEO agency, Tug, hadn’t spot­ted the need for them in an audit. 

A good exam­ple of how small changes can have a big impact came with the dis­cov­ery that Finas­tra was using a font on the site that dif­fered from the default option in the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Sim­ply chang­ing it to match the default has enabled far high­er page down­load speeds.

This focus on serv­ing con­tent to cus­tomers more smooth­ly will give firms a com­pet­i­tive edge on Google’s rank­ings, accord­ing to Tina Lange, senior SEO con­sul­tant at Search­metrics. The company’s research has revealed a low lev­el of aware­ness among busi­ness­es, which means that few will be ready in time for the start of the update in June. 

Lange’s advice is for com­pa­nies to look not only at their own sites, but also at those of their com­peti­tors. Google has tools for mea­sur­ing a page’s per­for­mance that can spec­i­fy what a busi­ness is get­ting right and where it can improve. They also show if rivals are bet­ter pre­pared and so give a busi­ness some strong hints at how they might fare bet­ter when the page expe­ri­ence update begins.