Page Experience: What Website Owners Need to Know for 2021

User Experience – a common question us website owners and marketing
managers ask daily… and something that Google will be expanding further on come 2021.

So what do you need to know about the changes and how can you prepare
yourselves and your websites to stay on Googles good tab?

Firstly, it’s important to be aware of your websites Core Web Vitals,
which is a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness and visual stability; they are in place to help site owners (like us) measure the user experience on our websites.

In 2021 (May, to be specific) Google will be building further on these
vitals to create a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a
web page. This will be done by introducing a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience.

What is Page Experience?

Its objective is to measure aspects of how users perceive the experience
of interacting with a web page and optimizing these factors is what will make the experience better for the user, therefore, contributing to online business success.

With the combination of our Core Web Vitals and Googles existing Search
signals for page experience we get the holistic picture of page experience – as shown in the image below.

Source: Google Webmasters

“Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page. By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they're looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.” Google Webmaster reports.

What can you do to get ahead of these changes?

Google has updated popular developer tools to ensure Core Web Vitals
information and recommendations are at the forefront of developers minds, please see below a couple that you can use:

PageSpeed Insights

Link: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Allows you to analyze page performance according to the main page
experience metrics.

We have all experienced the feeling of a slow website and that instant
impatience we get when waiting for it to load. It is VITAL for the success of
your user experience to ensure that speed is a priority come 2021.

Here are a couple of points you can consider to improve your loading
speed:

• Check on your hosting speed and upgrade if necessary
• Disable unnecessary plugins
• Compress files and coding to make the page lighter
• Create dynamic displays to encourage interest
• Use high-performance themes and never use pirated themes

Google Lighthouse

Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/blipmdconlkpinefehnmjammfjpmpbjk

Is an automated solution used to enhance web applications by simulating
various situations and conditions to evaluate page performance.

Google Search Console

Link: https://search.google.com/search-console/about (under Enhancements)

Identifies the URLs with the best performance and those that need improvement.

Mobile-Friendly Test

Link: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Checks whether the website is compatible to different screen sizes, and
that the page structure contains elements that contribute to the user experience on smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

Crazy Egg

Link: https://www.crazyegg.com/

Is a web analytics tool that makes use of heat maps to assess users’
behaviour. 

Beyond figures, numbers and reports Page Experience sums up the ever
evolving human behaviour experience and with it the constant evolvement of SEO.

It is an exciting time, as we grow into a new phase of the digital market – one where companies and users build a new internet together.

If you don't have a web developer, or if you are not an expert in SEO, consider researching agencies that can help you tackle the challenge of page speed.