Send us a text

Page Experience Google update

We now have a deadline around when the Core Web Vitals measurements impact rankings - May of 2021. Let’s talk about how to prepare.

Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google has announced that the metrics measured in their Core Web vitals report data will impact rankings in May 2021, as well as previous metrics like web usability, web safety,  and interstitials.

It will be an aggregated ranking signal. 

Here's the announcement:

The new page experience ranking factor will include: 

• Load Speed (‘Largest Contentful Paint’ factor from Core Web Vitals)
• Responsiveness (‘First Input Delay’ from Core Web Vitals)
• Visual Layout Stability (‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ from Core Web Vitals)
• Whether URLs are mobile-friendly
• Safe and Clean Website Code (Safe Browsing with no Malware)
• Use of HTTPS Encryption
• No Intrusive Interstitials

What are the metrics, and what are good measurements?

The three core elements are a part of Google Lighthouse and include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures the time it takes for a page’s primary content to load. According to Google, load times under 2.5 seconds are good, and over 4 seconds is poor.
• First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures the amount of time it takes after loading the page for a user to be able to interact with the page. According to Google, 100 milliseconds or less is good, and anything over 300 milliseconds is poor.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures whether items shift while loading, and the lower the CLS, the better - Google says that .1 is good and higher than .25 is poor. 

How do you go about benchmarking your existing site?

You can find these metrics in:

• Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report

And in that report, you can find recommendations for improvement using Page Speed Insights and Chrome Lighthouse.  It’s essential to keep in mind that while the report shows you a range for “good” URLs, reports have demonstrated that URLs ranking #1 in Google search had average mobile page load times of 1.10 seconds. 

And how about new sites?

And if you’re working on a new site and need to measure Core Web Vitals before launch, I recommend the following:

• Screaming Frog with the Pagespeed API
• Or Deepcrawl

Both of which run off of lab data.

And if your site allows for crawling from unknown IPs, there are a bunch of other tools that can assist and let you check in bulk, including:

Here are the ways you can support the SEO Tips podcast.

You can send me a donation at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katherinewong. Any and all levels of donations are appreciated and will help offset the cost of producing the podcast. You should also subscribe to our newsletter so that you don't miss a future episode.