It’s unusual that the major tech firms give us more than a few months advance notice on major updates, so when they do, those of us in the tech world tend to sit up and take notice.

Therefore when, over a year ago, Google let us know that they were planning on a major update to their algorithm – which they were referring to as the “Page Experience” signal – and that we should expect that update to happen in May of 2021, my team at Dock9 quickly recognised its significance.

The reason for this was the potential impact this update could have to online properties (i.e. websites and apps) and Google’s reasoning was having this amount of notice would help everyone take care of the optimisations needed to get through this update unscathed.

Whilst the Core Web Vitals (CWV) rollout is planned to start in mid-June 2021, the ‘page experience update’ won’t be fully executed until the end of August. This gradual schedule will allow tech/web development teams to make necessary refinements with a page experience vision in mind to avoid the risk of potential search engine ranking fluctuations.

I won’t bore you with the technical aspects in terms of what page experience signals this update affects, although my team would be happy to go through them in detail with CTOs and digital teams! However, the purpose of this article is to give some guidance as to how you can measure and track CWV, plus provide some quick tips in response to Google’s update.

Page experience

Google recently introduced a new Page Experience report in its Search Console. The Page Experience report (currently only for mobile pages) offers insightful metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, allowing you to quickly evaluate performance.

It’s also possible to dig into the components of page experience signal to obtain additional insights on opportunities for improvement.

Some more technical tips include:

• Tips to improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

o   Determine on a page level what the largest element is that needs to be loaded, usually an image or video asset.

o   Optimise it using responsive design or next-gen image formats (WebP, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR).

o   Try to use a cleaner template with fewer plugins if possible.

o   Reduce render-blocking resources such as CSS and JS.

• Tips to improve First Input Delay (FID)

o   Optimising how JavaScript parses, compiles, and executes on your web page will directly reduce FID.

o   Break up Long Tasks

o   Optimise your page for interaction readiness

o   Use a web worker

o   Reduce JavaScript execution time

• Tips to improve Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
  • Be aware which elements can shift on your pages and plan your layout to include enough space for them.
  • Systematically include size attributes on your images and video elements, or otherwise reserve the required space with something like CSS aspect ratio boxes.
  • Do not insert content above an existing one, except in response to a user interaction. This guarantees any layout shifts that occur are expected.

The mobile user experience is critical when looking at CWV. It is therefore not a surprise that websites that currently rank high in Google tend to have superior page experience scores.

What’s more, the average performance of the majority of websites is in general lower than Google’s CWV benchmarks, hence this situation offers website owners a great opportunity for ranking improvement by outperforming other competitor websites in terms of CVW.

Let’s be clear though that although it is important to have a great page experience it does not and will not overrule having great page content.

On the other hand, in cases where there are similar pages in terms of relevancy, page experience can be much more impactful for visibility.

As ever, it’s all about striking a balance, but keeping on top of such changes to how Google looks at websites is vital as if you aren’t, you can be sure many of your competitors are.

Mark Lusted is CEO of Dock9