Google has a new update coming soon to their Page Experience ranking signals for Search Results. Slated to launch in June 2021, the update to the Page Experience signal combines Core Web Vitals with existing search signals which include mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
Core Web Vitals were previously introduced by Google as a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a web page. The metrics that makeup Core Web Vitals focus on three aspects of the user experience – loading, interactivity, and visual stability:
- 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 an 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
According to Google, “Metrics are calculated at the 75th percentile over a 28-day window. By using the 75th percentile, we know that most visits to the site (3 out of 4) experienced the target level of performance or better. If a page hits the recommended targets for all three metrics, it passes the web vitals assessment.”
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/104436075
To prepare for these changes, Google has released a variety of tools that can be used to start improving your site’s page experience. Here at Kalio, we’re already utilizing these tools on our customers’ ecommerce websites to make page performance enhancements and identify opportunities to improve the overall page experience.
