Google Page Experience 2021
On Nov 10, 2020 Google announced that Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The page experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with Google’s existing search signals including mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, Https-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
In 2010 Google had announced that it will take site speed into account while determining rankings. Google included page speed ranking in mobile search results in 2018. Its inclusion of user interface factors in ranking of a website will force developers & designers to consider these factors other than just optimizing for speed.
As per Google, providing information about the quality of the web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit. On the results like image preview provides topical context for users, visual indicators on the page are another way to do the same. Google is working on these visual indicators that identifies pages based on page experience criteria. We plan to test this soon and if the testing is successful, it will launch in May 2021 and we’ll share more details on the progress of this in the coming months as per Google’s announcement.
Web Vitals
On May 5, 2020, Google had introduced the Web Vitals initiative to provide unified guidance for quality signals that essential for great user experience on the web.
Core Web Vitals
These are common set of signals that are critical to all web experiences. Core experience needs include:
- Loading experience
- Interactivity
- Visual Stability
These combined are foundation of 2020 Core Web Vitals and includes the following metrics (and their respective thresholds):
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- Largest Contentful Paint measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded.
- First Input Delay measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to first interact with the page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and quantifies the amount of unexpected layout shift of visible page content.
For each of the above metrics, to ensure you’re hitting the recommended target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices.
All of these metrics capture important user-centric outcomes, are field measurable, and have supporting lab diagnostic metric equivalents and tooling. Read more about the core web vitals here.
By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.
Google has updated popular developer tools such as Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights to help developers understand how their sites measure on Core Web Vitals and addressing noted issues.
- Lighthouse in DevTools is now at version 6.0.
- PageSpeed Insights incorporates the new metrics.
- New Chrome User Experience Report API lets you access up to 28 days of historical data for your URLs.Experience section in DevTools Performance panel.
- Search Console’s new Core Web Vitals report for a summary of how your site performs.
- Web Vitals Chrome Extension for quick access to metrics from the browser.
Google will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience does not override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.
Top Stories feature will not require AMP
The mobile top stories feature currently emphasizes AMP content. AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page. Alongside this change, page experience will become a ranking factor in Top Stories, in addition to the many factors assessed. As before, pages must meet the Google News content policies to be eligible. Site owners who currently publish pages as AMP, or with an AMP version, will see no change in behavior – the AMP version will be what’s linked from Top Stories.