A Quick Guide to Google’s Page Experience Update 2021 [Infographic]

Are you yet to get around optimizing your site for the Google Page Experience update?

Well, it's not too late to start.

And in this post, we look at the various page experience signals and how your business can optimize for them.

Let's get started.

1. Mobile-Friendliness

Since Google now uses mobile-first indexing, having a site that's not mobile-friendly affects your rankings.

For this reason, you need to ensure visitors who use their mobile devices to access your web pages have no problems viewing content, images, or links.

And the solution?

Use Search Console's Mobile Usability report to find out if your content fits the screen or if you have text that's too small. You can use Text Optimization Tool, to rank higher in search engine results.

to rank higher in search engine results.

Secondly, check that all your individual web pages are mobile-friendly with the Mobile-Friendly Test.

Then, with the results, take care of the issues and make your whole site mobile-friendly.

2. Intrusive Interstitials

These are pop-ups that lead to negative user experiences since they prevent visitors from accessing pages they want. They include pop-ups that one must dismiss before seeing the main content or those that cover an entire page immediately a user navigates to the page.

And the solution?

Manually access each of your pages from different devices to see how your interstitials affect user experience. Next, redesign your interstitials so they don't obstruct the main content.

3. HTTPS

Serving content over a non-secure HTTP connection can make your website visitors' data vulnerable. This is especially risky if the user needs to input their personal information.

On the other hand, using HTTPS can ensure you protect website visitors from potential cyberattacks.

How?

HTTPS offers three layers of protection, namely:

Encryption: Ensures data exchanged is secure from eavesdroppers and that as the user browses your site, malicious people do not steal their information or track their activities.

Data integrity: Reduces the possibility that someone can corrupt or modify data during transfer without detection.

Authentication: Ensures users communicate with the intended website and avoid man-in-the-middle attacks. This also builds user trust and can assure visitors of their data safety.

But how do you fix HTTPS issues?

Leverage website security tools to check what pages have forms served over HTTP. Then update your SSL certificate and migrate all your resources and URLs to HTTPS.

Obtain security certificates that verify the web address given belongs to your brand. Doing this also protects visitors from man-in-the-middle attacks.

Redirect visitors to the HTTPS page using permanent server-side redirects.

Ensure Google can index and crawl your site. Leverage the URL Inspection Tool to confirm this, then ensure that you’ve not blocked your pages with robots.txt files.

Make sure your site supports HSTS. This, the HTTP Strict Transport Security, ensures the browser requests the HTTPS version even if the user keys in HTTP. Additionally, it tells Google to serve secure URLs when showing results, thus reducing the risk of users getting served unsecured content.

Add your new HTTPS site to Search Console once you migrate from HTTP. Not doing so can affect your traffic numbers since Search Console treats these two versions as separate entities.

4. Core Web Vitals

Current metrics making up Core Web Vitals include:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Tracks loading performance, and recommendations are that it occurs at 2.5 seconds when a page starts loading.

First Input Delay (FID): Tracks interactivity, and recommendations are that a page should have it at 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Tracks visual stability, and recommendations are that pages maintain it at 0.1 or less.

How do you optimize for them?

LCP is mainly associated with videos, images, heading tags, lists, etc. It also involves server response times, plugins, JavaScript, and webpage resources.

You should, therefore, speed up servers and ensure that the images and videos you upload are not bulky. You can leverage a compression tool like TinyImage to reduce file sizes before uploading them to web pages.

For more page experience elements and how you can optimize for them, the infographic below from Attrock.com can help. Check it out!