From June, Google’s page ranking algorithm is going to weigh your website’s speed much more heavily in its ranking score. Site page speed has always been a part of the score, but it’s becoming more important, as a new performance score will be assigned, called the Google Page Experience Score.
What is Google Page Experience?
Google Page Experience measures how users perceive their interaction with a website. This measurement includes signals, such as technical markers and metrics (Core Web Vitals) like speed, page load performance, and how stable the page is visually.
How is Google Page Experience measured?
Google’s in-house tool for measuring page speeds is called Lighthouse. Lighthouse provides reports that indicate where you need to work on or improve your site for the key attributes, such as performance, SEO and aligning with best practices and then drills down into more detailed metrics for these attributes.
Page load performance: Know the score
Digital marketing, not usually the hub of IT and web performance enhancements, can influence some backend considerations for web performance. This is especially true when it can be shown that performance metrics affect the bottom line in a big way. Leading to discoverability, search engine placement and user QoE, marketing may not be able to change the underlying programming but should be able to work together with the web and tech teams to push through some of the least invasive and most valuable Google Page Experience enhancements.
A number of metrics inform Google Page Experience scoring. There are several metrics, and some are easier to manage from a digital marketing perspective — or at least to influence. Thus even if a digital marketeer or leader is only able to make the web team aware of these factors and what they mean for the business, you’ve already made a difference.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): How long it takes to start displaying the content inside your web browser’s window. It’s roughly equivalent to an “above-the-line” view without scrolling down on the page you’re looking at. The score is determined in large part by how long initial HTML takes to load and relies heavily on how long it takes to fetch from the backend server (what Lighthouse refers to as “initial server response time”). Making ample use of web caching whenever you can is one way to reduce the page load speed considerably. Another trick is using delivery compression whenever possible to help reduce the amount of content the browser needs to download.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Much like FCP, this measures load time, but LCP measures how long it takes to load most of the content. Here again, a number of tweaks and tricks can help, such as (again!) caching, especially images or JavaScript and other resources the page needs to load.
- Time to Interactive (TTI): The name speaks for itself. How long does it take before the user can perform actions on the page, clicking and interacting with the content?
Google Page Experience checklist
While many companies will turn to experts to help guide the Google Page Experience improvement process, there are some easy-to-use tools to help you measure that you’re on the right track.
- Google Search Console
The Google Search Console provides a fast and effective way to get a handle on your website’s overall performance.
- Google PageSpeed Insights
The PageSpeed tool provides an overview of how users experience your website and suggestions for ways to improve the experience in an easy-to-interpret score.
- Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a free website auditing tool from Google that measures your core web vitals (the FCP, LCP and TTI listed above, for example).
It all comes down to user experience
There are several other important metrics but the most important thing is the perception of and quality of the user experience, which can be enhanced by making as many improvements to initial and complete page load and interaction time. For marketers and their teams, achieving better scores in the Lighthouse tool might be one way to demonstrate active work toward improving search visibility, and can be a way for web and marketing teams to work together to support business goals.
Getting ready for Google Page Experience
While website and page performance doesn’t fall into the normal purview of marketing responsibilities, in some ways, we believe anything that can enhance overall performance should be a joint responsibility for everyone. As more companies strive to do more with less and rely on cross-functional teams to accomplish big goals with fewer resources, we can help to bridge the divide between web teams and marketing teams to make the most of what both offer, and give Google exactly what it’s looking for.
Get in touch to talk to us about all the ways you can prepare for the new Google Page Experience.
