Google Page Experience matters – Things to keep in mind when designing your clients’ website.

Google Page Experience matters – Things to keep in mind when designing your clients’ website.

Google is the most used search engine there is in the world. It takes over 80% of the world’s searches. To help users have a pleasant user experience, Google has made a ranking system to put the best pages first. To have a good site performance, you can not just add data and content to the site. Site owners have to make sure their sites appear in the top search results. The way to do this is by having a good core web vitals score.

What are Google core Web vitals?

Google core web vitals are a set of factors google considers essential in an overall web page user experience. These factors measure how fast a user can interact with a page. The elements are divided into three. They are LCP FID CLS.

Other web core vitals are taken into accounts, such as mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and no intrusive interstitials.

You can find your site’s core web vitals data in your google search console account in the enhancements section.

In the end, core web vitals are a set of factors that will be part of the “page experience” score. In other words, it is part of the user experience score.

Google has developed and made accessible some handy resources and tools to help developers optimize their websites and make them more attractive. Some examples would be Pagespeed insights and the Google search console. These tools are also helpful because you can get feedback on how your page has performed in the real world based on chrome browser data.

LCP FID and CLS will become part of the 200 other metrics Google uses to measure page experience by people and to rank the search results.

What is LCP Google?

LCP, also known as the largest contentful paint, is a user-centric metric used for measuring loading speed because it measures the time the site’s main content had loaded. Fast most extensive contentful color will help the user feel that the page is helpful.

Historically, website owners and web developers had difficulty measuring how quickly the main content of the page loads and is visible to a user. Older metric tools weren’t necessarily helpful to estimate when web pages’ primary content was visible to users as not always what the user sees corresponds with this data.

So what is LCP? The LCP metric measures the render time of the most significant text block or image that becomes visible relative to when the page first started loading. In other words, it is how fast you go from clicking a link to seeing the majority of the content on your screen.

LCP is different from other page speed measurements. Other page speed metrics don’t necessarily represent how much time it takes to open a website. LCP has become the most accurate of them all.

An excellent way to check on your LCP scoring is by using Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool is straightforward to use. You copy your site URL and analyze it. Afterward, there will be a report given to you with helpful information regarding all the critical areas where the developers have to improve or change something.

In the google search console, you should look at your LCP data. Why check it there? That would be because the search console data comes directly from the Chrome User Experience Report.

Google has specific guidelines when it comes to LCP. They have divided it into three areas: Good, Needs Improvement and Poor.

A good LCP score would be 2.5 seconds or less. Making sure most of your users are hitting this target quickly. If 75 percent of page loads between mobile and desktop devices is 2.5 seconds or less, you are in the green.

This can be difficult for large web pages or pages with many features. Here are some of the things you can do to make your page go from Needs improvement to Good:

  • Remove any unnecessarily third-party scripts; a recent study has found that each third-party hand slows down a page for 34 ms each.
  • Upgrade your web host. Better hosting equals faster load times. Having a good provider will go a long way.
  • Set up lazy loading. This means that images load when someone scrolls down your page and not load every one of them at the same time. This way, you can achieve way better scoring.
  • Remove any significant page element; Google Pagespeed Insights will tell you if you have any considerable part slowing down your page.
  • Minify your CSS. A lot of code con delay LCP. Optimize your code to make it faster.

What is FID Google?

Next, we have the second core web vitals factor, First Input Delay (FID).

You have achieved FCP, but now the issue is if users can interact with your page.

First Input Delay measures precisely the time for a user to interact with your page. Some examples of interactions are:

  • Choosing an option from a menu
  • Clicking on a link in the navigation of the site
  • Entering your mail into a field
  • Opening up “according to text” on mobile devices

Google considers FID because it shows how real-life users interact with websites. What they like or don’t. Like FCP, Google has specific criteria to determine if an FID is acceptable.

FID technically measures how long it takes something to happen on a page. It goes beyond just measuring when something happens. And instead, it calculates when users do something on your page.

Some pages don’t even have FID as a factor shown by google tools. This may be because your page may not have login pages or other sites where you have to input something as a user.

There are some things you can use to improve your FID scoring:

  • Minimize or defer Javascript. As long as the site is loading, Javascript users will have difficulty interacting with i. Minimizing Javascript in your area will help FID.
  • Remove any third-party scripts. Having non-critical third-party scripts can affect FID as well as FCP.
  • Use browser cache. Having a browser cache will help your page content to load faster. Which at the same time helps your user’s browser to load javascript tasks faster.

What is CLS Google?

CLS is also known as Cumulative Layout Shift. CLS is a user-centric metric that measures visual stability because it helps determine how often users experience layout shifts when navigating a web page. A low CLS score will ensure that the users have a great experience visiting your page.

Cumulative layout shift is the unexpected shift of web page elements while going through it. The better the “visual stability,” the better the ranking. The factors that usually cause CLS are fonts, images, videos, contact forms, buttons, etc. Minimizing CLS will help you have a better experience for your users, making it easier for them to stay on your site. Poor CLS scores will indicate coding issues that need to be solved by the web developer and affect the ranking factor of the page.

CLS happens when:

  • There are images without dimensions
  • There are ads, embeds, iframes without dimensions
  • There is dynamically injected content
  • Web fonts causing FOIT/FOUT
  • Actions waiting for a network response before updating DOM

Google recommends web developers to use AspectRatioCalculator.com to calculate the aspect ratio of images and videos.

Remember that traffic may come from different devices. People may look at web content through other devices, so web designers should consider mobile and desktop devices.

Here are some simple things you can do to minimize layout shift:

  • Use fixed size attribute dimensions for any media (videos, images, GIFs, etc.). This way, the viewer’s browser will know the element’s size and won’t change it on the fly as pages load.
  • Ensure ad elements have a reserved space. Not having a set distance for ads can be harmful as they can suddenly appear at any part of the site. Having a set site will make them appear there, not moving any other content around.
  • Adding new UI elements below the fold they don’t push content down that a user might expect to stay where it is.

Why are Core Web Vitals important?

Google has changed its ranking factor scoring to make page experience part of it. Page experience will mix elements that Google considers necessary for user experience. The factors are:

  • HTTPS
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Lack of interstitial pop-ups
  • “Safe Browsing”(not having malware on your page)

Core web vitals will be an essential part of the scoring your site receives. Site owners will have to take measures and see what website details need improvement as core web vitals will make many page experience scores.

Having good Core Web vitals is essential, but it is only one factor that Google has into account. Having good SEO content will also be a part of scoring still. If you want to improve your Core Web Vitals, then great. We will be breaking down all three Core Web Vitals and some other vital information to show you how to improve and make a great page.

Google has also said that meeting all Core Web vitals benchmarks must be met to boost the ranking signal. This news came straight from the Google search Central SEO office.

People wonder how much it matters to have one of the Core Web Vitals requirements below Google’s standard. Mueller, one of Google’s executives, has said that these things will have significant importance with the Core Web Vitals update. With the Core Web Vitals, Google can know how good an experience a site is giving.

Do consider that these signals are not perfect and may need improvement in the future. The signs will change and improve through time, and so will the resources at your disposal. Through time a page with high performance may become one with poor performance if not updated to follow the new signals that come out over the years.

AMP is a Google-backed project to speed up the delivery of content. It is done through the use of a code known as AMP HTML. AMP is used to build sites for static content (sites that don’t change based on behavior). This allows sites to work faster than HTML. This will help your sites to appear in high-ranking search results as the CVW values it.

What is the Core Web Vitals Report?

The Core Web Vitals Report is one of the tools Google has created for developers to see the data about how their metrics perform on their page. This data gives you the opportunity and details you would need to make a great page in Google’s standard. The average user doesn’t have the resources to run a page speed analysis on a page, even less in 1000 pages.

The new Core Web Vitals Report in the google search console gives you an idea of how your sites to load. It puts all the pages it has in their data (Google) into three buckets, and each labeled, Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. The data used to measure each of these pages is made with accurate world data that Google has gotten from different avenues. They have now put these resources available to the public to improve their metrics and identify opportunities for improvement in their coding.

Page experience and page speed have become hot topics nowadays. Google has declared that page speed is a ranking factor now and page experience. There are plenty of tools Google has rolled out to help people see their pages’ scores and how to improve them.

The focus on page speed is nothing new. Page experience has become an essential factor when ranking, and people expect fast when visiting a great page. But, you should still not optimize for scores. Optimize to make it faster.

The Core Web Vitals Report (CVW) gets its metrics from the data it collects from the CrUX Report. The report is a public data set of real-world page experience collected from millions of pages. It contains the page experience and the type of devices such as mobile, desktop, etc., and much more.

Understanding the report is essential. If not, there will be no point in taking the trouble of doing so. The report shows URL performance grouped by status, metric type, and URL group (groups of similar pages). Do consider only indexed URL pages appear in the reports, as mentioned before. The information is composed of three metrics LCP, FID, and CLS. If a URL does not have a minimum amount of reporting data for any of these metrics, it will be omitted.

How to fix my CVW signals?

When dealing with non-technical issues on your page, to fix them, you should start with the ones labeled as “Poor,” then prioritize issues that affect your most crucial URL. URL issues marked as “Needs Improvement” could be improved but are less important to fix than the Poor URL.

Once you have all your issues sorted, share your report with your engineer or whoever will be updating your URL. There are some common fixes for your page. You could reduce your page size. It is best to have them be less than 500KB for a page and all its resources. Limit the number of page resources to 50 for best performance on mobile. Consider using AMP, which almost guarantees god page loading on both mobile and desktop.

You can test your page afterward using the PageSpeed Insights testing tool and the Chrome Lighthouse tool. When you think a particular issue has been resolved, click Start Tracking on the issue details page in the Search Console.

For website developers, we recommend reading the web. Dev fast loading guidelines and the web fundamentals performance pages on developers.google.com for theory and guidelines on how to improve your page.

AMP can have some issues as every code may lead to AMP sites from the site appearing in the google search results with AMP-specific features. We recommend using the Search Console Help get help if any errors happen in the future.

What makes a good website user experience?

The six characteristics of a good page experience are the following:

  • Applicable, your content should be original and fulfill a need.
  • Usable, the page must be easy to use.
  • Desirable image, identity, brand, and other design elements make the end-user feel emotion and appreciation.
  • Findable, content must be easy to navigate and locatable onsite and offsite.
  • Accessible content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities.
  • Credible, the end-user should trust and believe the content you tell them.

Page experience is a field that has been growing the last few years and is still being defined. Creating a successful experience for your end-user should take into account the principles of human-computer interaction and go further to include the following disciplines:

  • Project Management focuses on the planning and organizing aspect of a project and its resources.
  • User Research focuses on understanding end-user behaviors, needs, and motivations.
  • Usability Evaluation focuses on how satisfied an end-user is with the product if the product has helped them achieve their goal and how difficult it was to learn to use it.
  • Information Architecture focuses on how information is presented, organized, and structured to the end-user.
  • User Interface design anticipates what an end-user might need to do, and the interface elements are easy to access.
  • Interaction Design creates interactive systems with clear and straightforward behaviors.
  • Visual design to create a page layout that is attractive and pleasing. It should be in line with the band goals.
  • Content Strategy focuses on writing helpful content.
  • Accessibility focuses on how a disabled individual or individuals access or benefit from your sites, applications, or system.
  • Web Analytics focuses on collecting, reporting, and analyzing page data.

How do I optimize my user experience?

To improve the experience visitors have on our website, you should follow this list:

  1. Use white space and be afraid to leave some white space in your web design. It helps make your content more legible while also enabling the users to focus on the text’s images and other decorations.
  2. Optimize site speed. Going to a slow page is frustrating to all of us. Having a high site speed will help a lot with the perceived page experience.
  3. Use attractive calls to action. Customers are already accustomed to visual stimulation. It needs to move with an action word. This will make it more easily navigable and get the customer to go where he wants quickly.
  4. Use hyperlink differentiation. Adding hyperlinks will tell your readers you want them to click on them. Having hyperlinks clearly defined will help the reader differentiate between text and a hyperlink.
  5. Segment key information with bullet points. This will make the text more attractive and make it so that the reader quickly gets the critical data.
  6. Image use is recommended. Choosing what image to put on your site will help you with your SEO and retention of visits but use them wisely. Readers will differentiate between a stick image and a unique image.
  7. Include well-designed and written headlines. Including keywords in your headlines will help you with SEO and help retain readers. Most readers will decide if they stay in a site by the headlines. This will also help to attract the right audience.
  8. Keep your website pages consistent. This means making everything compatible. Heading sizes, font choices, coloring, button styles, spacing. Everything should have the same theme. This will improve the page experience and make it feel cohesive.
  9. Catch your 404s, search engines will not punish you for light 404 errors, but while possible, customers or readers will, when they try and click an image or link, expect to be taken where they want to go.
  10. Be mobile-friendly.