No user likes to stay on a page that takes time to load. It is the reason Google declared page experience as a new ranking factor. Website owners try their best to get a good rank in SERPs. They follow SEO techniques and other paid tactics so that their website gets visibility.
Google ranks the page based on various factors such as domain age, mobile-friendliness, the security of a website, user experience, etc. But in today’s times, Google has also declared that page experience is going to be a significant ranking factor. If your web pages take time to load then not only the users would like to stay at your website, but also Google wouldn’t give your site a good rank.
The simplified user page experience criteria are mobile-friendliness, how fast the pages get loaded, etc. These are a significant ranking factor. This update will get started in 2021, and you have a lot of time to prepare. Before preparing yourself for this considerable ranking factor, you need to find out what actually page experience is? The answer to this query of yours is mentioned below.
Page Experience
Page Experience simply means how a user responds and perceive to a particular webpage. The page experience is based on several factors, such as whether the page loads quickly or is mobile-friendly or not. The presence of ads and page reload options also expresses page experience. Here are the following Google ranking factors that determine the page experience.
- Mobile-friendliness
- Page speed
- HTTPs ranking boosts
- Safe browsing penalty
These factors come under Core Web Vitals. Now, you must be wondering what Core Web Vitals are. The brief definition of Core Web Vitals is below.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are the user-centered-metrics that give a score to a particular page regarding the various aspects of a page. The list of these metrics is below.
- Largest Contentful Paint: It measures the loading performance of a page. If you wish to provide the users with great user experience, then you must first ensure that the LCP of your page occurs within the 2.5 seconds as soon as the page starts loading.
- First Input Delay: First Input Delay measures the interactivity of a page. If you wish to provide the audience with excellent user experience, then you need to ensure that your pages have FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: If you want to provide excellent user experience to the audience, then you must maintain a CLS of less than one on your webpage.
When you combine all these elements, then you will get user page experience, what you need to know that a page experience alone is not a ranking factor. Instead, these elements can determine the ranking of your page. Aside from the three mentioned above, more elements determine page experience.
- Mobile-friendliness: Most users are operating through mobile; therefore, the websites need to be mobile-friendly. If you want to provide your audience with a better page experience, then you must make sure that your page is mobile-friendly.
- Safe browsing: Another critical factor is safe browsing. Your page must not contain harmful or deceptive content for the audience. It will annoy the audience, and the page experience will get damaged.
- HTTPs: You also need to make your website secure and ensure that your website is served over HTTPs.
- No intrusive interstitials: Lastly, the content of your pages must be accessible to the user.
Preparation for the update
Page Experience is going to be a ranking factor, but there is good news for the users that it’s not going to live today. It may start in 2021. But you also need not ignore the fact that Google has officially announced that page experience is going to be a ranking factor. Google has promised that it will inform the users six months before when the page experience will become a ranking factor. In this tough time of Pandemic, everyone is worried about their business, and perhaps this is the reason Google is giving the website owner’s enough time to prepare themselves for this update.
Moreover, this update is not going to be enormous, and even if your website has poor page experience, then your webpages can rank higher in Google search, according to Rudy Galfi.
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The predominance of great content
Google has also made it clear that great content is the most critical factor. If your website has great content but not so good page experience then also your website can get a good rank in Google SERPs. Page experience is not a dominant ranking factor, and it will never be. A good page experience can’t override relevant and well-written content. But your content must stand out if your content is similar to other material on Google then page experience will be an essential factor.