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Reviewing the Recent Google Page Experience Desktop Update

As the undisputed leader of the search engine market, Google has always been at the forefront of defining criteria that help improve the user experience; with the latest addition being the Google page experience for desktops. Google originally announced this a year ago and now has officially confirmed that the update rollout will be complete by the end of March 2022.

SEOs and webmasters are no strangers to Google’s frequent algorithm updates. Some even posit that search engine optimization is dead because of the constant changes in the inner workings of Google Search. But according to King Kong, the highest converting traffic still comes from Google’s organic listings. The impact of the most recent change, however, could be far-reaching including your website’s PageRank and traffic.

Google has stated that the page experience for the desktop will be based on the same set of signals that were originally introduced last year for mobile. So, what does this mean for businesses based on the information we have?

Page Experience Breakdown

In 2020, Google announced that they were about to define a new set of signals to measure the quality of the users’ experience with a webpage. These metrics would include all aspects of how users interact with a given webpage and how well it meets their expectations.

When Google revealed these signals, some of them like fast loading times and mobile-friendliness were long-known in the industry and many businesses had adjusted to them already. However, some were new criteria defined to better measure things like interactivity, visual stability, and speed. Google called them Core Web Vitals. Now that we know these metrics are being applied to desktops, let’s take a look at each to see what they measure and how improving them will increase the visibility of our website in search.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

The Largest Contentful Paint is about how fast a webpage is perceived to be loaded by the user. As such, it focuses on the elements that users can see on the screen. The goal is to measure how quickly the user can access the main content of a given page.

For this purpose—as the name suggests—Google has come up with a solution that measures the loading time of the largest image or text block on the page. In order to be considered good in this regard, a website should aim to have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less. Anything between 2.5 to 4.0 seconds needs improvement and pages with an LCP of over 4.0 seconds are considered to be poor-performing.

First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay was defined to weed out unresponsive websites. It aims to measure how responsive a given page feels to the users when they try to interact with it.

FID does this by calculating the time it takes for a webpage to respond to an action a user has taken. An example of this would be the duration of time from the moment you click on a button or submit a form until the moment the page starts (emphasis on the start) to process it. An FID of 100 milliseconds is considered to be highly responsive and an FID of over 300 milliseconds is considered to be sluggish and poor.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Unlike the other two Web Vital scores that focus on speed, Cumulative Layout Shift targets visual stability. Sometimes the pages we visit start to shift and move around out of nowhere while we are in the middle of reading content or clicking on a link or button. These unexpected movements can be downright annoying or sometimes even result in actions we never intended to do. We may not experience it too often compared to the other problems we mentioned earlier but when it happens, it is detrimental to the user experience. CLS measures how often it happens to the visitors of a website.

It is imperative that businesses make sure they are meeting these requirements to the best of their capabilities in order to get good Core Web Vital scores as part of their page experience score.

HTTPS

Another signal that complements the Core Web Vitals is the HTTPS requirement. This is a security protocol that protects the data transferred between the user and the site’s server. Security is a top priority for Google because they do not want to rank unsafe websites and risk compromising user data.

HTTPS encryption helps prevent data interception and modification from attackers and provides authentication mechanisms that ensure users are communicating with the intended server.

No Intrusive Interstitials

Intrusive interstitials are pop-ups or content displayed over an expected page. We all have had this experience where we go to a website and are bombarded with different banners that obscure the website’s content. In these situations, we have no option other than clicking off of them which is intrusive and hinders the user experience. 

So, when websites want to use attention grabbers such as slide-ins, pop-ups, or exit intent banners, they need to implement them in ways that don’t frustrate users by preventing them from accessing website content aggressively. 


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