What Are Page Experience Signals, and Can They Improve Your Website's Ranking?
Make browsing on your website smooth like buttered steak gliding in a porcelain pan.
What can you do to ensure your website’s visitors don’t have an immediate urge to click away?
Writing value-packed blog posts or snarky product descriptions is great. Ultimately, they are going to affect your rank the most.
That's what Google says anyway:
„While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar.“
However, you need to put in some effort to keep visitors from leaving before they even have a chance to read that witty soap dispenser description.
Content might be a king but in today’s online marketing, you need something more to break the tie. Creating a seamless page experience for your visitors is a brilliant start.
You might have already heard of Core Web Vitals since they’re the “new thing” in the UX world. They measure your site’s loading, responsiveness, and visual stability, but they aren’t the only metrics determining if your site is heaven or bust.
Let’s have a closer look at all the signals involved in a positive page experience.
Page Experience
Besides Core Web Vitals, there are four more search signals:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Safe browsing
- HTTPS
- Intrusive interstitial guidelines
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is part of Google’s ranking system since April 2015. The decision was made after mobile searches surpassed the ones by desktops. Having your site optimized for mobile is an absolute must.
Since July 2019, Google has also started to use mobile-first indexing for all new websites. It means that Google uses the mobile version of your site to index and subsequently rank your website.
Safe browsing
With safe browsing, Google is trying to protect users from deceptive sites, harmful content, or unwanted software.
You’ve most likely experienced it yourself before. Google lets you know that you’re about to enter a site that’s deceptive or contains malware.
Sometimes, your site can get hacked into and become compromised. That’s why you should be aware of this potential danger and power-up on security.
HTTPS
One way to make your visitors feel safe is using HTTPS instead of HTTP. HTTPS is a secure protocol that encrypts everything your visitors fill out on your website. It’s especially important for sensitive data like bank account information, etc.
You gain HTTPS by purchasing a TLS/SSL certificate. You can check that a site is secure by a small lock on the address bar.
Intrusive Interstitials Guidelines
Interstitial is a type of ad that covers majority or your entire screen. That’s right — pop-ups. Some people feel indifferent towards them, some fume every time they appear. I think one pop-up is manageable, especially if the copy is good or it offers something useful. But when you must get through a full-screen cookie alert, free e-book download, a webinar sign-up, and a discount code, I’m out.
Using pop-ups that are making it difficult to access the content people came for might deck your ranking.
Not all interstitials are viewed as intrusive though, for example, when they are legally required (cookies, age verification, etc.).
I understand why marketers use pop-ups. They are annoying but effective. When they dangle that “10x your income in 3 months” e-book right in front of you, it’s hard to resist the curiosity. In the end, you’re just giving away your email address, not your kidney, right?
But for the sake of a good page experience, use them sparingly and wisely.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a part of Google’s ranking signals since mid-June 2021.
As of right now, there are 3 metrics included in Core Web Vitals. Depending on how well your site stands with these metrics, Google ranks them on a spectrum — good, needs improvement, and bad. To pass the assessment, you need all three metrics in the good zone.
And what exactly are those metrics? Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Can somebody explain those in baby language, please?
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how long it takes for the biggest element on a page to load in the visible portion of a website. It might be a block of text, an image, or a video.
Keep in mind this metric doesn’t measure the speed of an entire site.
- Good: ≤ 2,5 s
- Needs improvement: ≤ 4 s
- Poor: \> 4 s
The speed of a website is undoubtedly an important aspect of user experience. Slow loading is incredibly frustrating. According to Google, if the loading time of a page goes from 1 s to 3 s, the bounce rate increases by 32%. Add another 3 s and it becomes 106%.
You can learn about optimizing LCP on web.dev.
First Input Delay (FID)
This metric relates to the interactivity of your website. It measures how swiftly your site responds when a visitor tries to interact with it, e.g., clicking on a link or button.
The response must be within milliseconds, or your website will feel sluggish. Also, scrolling or zooming don’t count as an interaction.
- Good: ≤ 100 ms
- Needs improvement: ≤ 300 ms
- Poor: \> 300 ms
You can learn more about optimizing FID on web.dev.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS is about the visual stability of your site. It counts every time your website’s layout unexpectedly shifts. Your visitors then might “miss-click” on an underwear ad that suddenly loaded when they really just wanted to confirm their order.
The size of the element and the distance it moved affects the score of CLS.
- Good: ≤ 0,1
- Needs improvement: ≤ 0,25
- Poor: \> 0,25
You can learn about optimizing CLS on web.dev.
You can assess the performance of your website according to these metrics with tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Lighthouse.
The conclusion is — Core Web Vitals, along with other page experience factors, can absolutely affect your site’s ranking. Are they the most important for landing on page 1? No, great content still has the upper hand. However, there are a lot of websites with outstanding texts, so user experience can be a tie-breaker for websites that have equally good content.
