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Google’s changing the speed. How does your website keep up?


As announced in 2020, Google will be updating the way it ranks your website from May 2021. The update places user experience (UX) at the core of the influencer scale. So, building an amazing new site for a client or updating your existing one with the following UX principles, has never been more important.

The 3 elements of page experience

An awesome page experience ensures visitors are more efficient with the time spent on your website. Not only making it a better experience for the person but a more engaging one with your brand and/or business. The other side of the coin, a crappy experience, of course, equates to someone struggling to find what they’re looking for and wasting valuable time doing it.

In essence there are 3 primary areas that Google will be focusing on in this update:

  1. Loading time – how speedy does your site appears.
  2. Interactivity – how speedy does your site respond to various inputs.
  3. Visual Stability – how much does your website layout move around while loading.

How does Google measure UX? Cue, Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be surfaced across all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome. - Web Vitals by Philip Walton

A closer look at the metrics:

  • 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.

User experience matters...more

Long before this Google update, the importance of user experience has always been up there as paramount, for the success of your website and for those using it. Google is simply altering some of the metrics used to measure it and will reward you more for focussing on these areas.

Content is still king, UX however, is now most certainly Queen.  

Top resources to help you stay ahead of these changes:



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Location: Australia

Comments

  1. Nondas Angelakos | iAmDigital7 April 2021 at 15:37

    Yoast are holding a great little page speed webinar on April 9, so be sure to check it out, it's free!

    https://www.crowdcast.io/e/yoast-page-speed-webinar-2021/register

    ReplyDelete

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