Search Engine giant Google has announced – well ahead of the release of the new update – that it will be adding a new ranking factor to its stable of criteria used to measure how well your website satisfies user queries.
The Google Page Experience update, which will only go live in 2021, aims to measure how a user perceives the experience of a page on a website and will rank it accordingly.
The update, which forms part of the Core Web Vitals toolkit, takes a number of factors into account including:
- Mobile-friendliness
- Page loading speed
- HTTPS ranking
- Intrusive interstitial
- Safe browsing penalties
These are grouped into three overarching Core Vitals metrics as follows:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
The overall Page Experience score will be determined by how well a page performs within the above parameters.
And while it will be a large update that website owners need to take into account, Google has promised it will give a 6-month notice so that preparations can be made.
Added to this, there is a new Core Web Vitals report functionality in Search Console, which allows webmasters to begin the review and improvement process ahead of the update next year.
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