Google updates its search algorithm 500 to 600 times a year on average, with some updates occurring twice a day. While the majority of these changes will have little impact on the digital marketing landscape, there are a few that are worth noticing.
In May of 2021, Google revealed that a new ranking algorithm, meant to score web sites based on how visitors perceive the website’s experience, will be released to the public. In layman’s terms, this means that if Google considers a website’s user experience (UX) is poor, it will not rank the site as highly in search engine result pages. The Google page experience upgrade is the name of this update.
What is The Page Experience Update?
Google will always aim to provide the most useful and accurate content to users, necessitating frequent revisions. This page experience update aims to better understand how a user would view a certain web page’s experience in order to make it more user-friendly.
The update takes into account things like:
- If the page is secured with HTTPS,
- Whether or not the page contains obtrusive advertisements
- The speed with which a page loads
- If the page can be viewed on a mobile device, it is considered mobile friendly (applicable for mobile page experience update)
Core Web Vitals
Largest Contenful Paint (LCP)
Loading performance is measured using the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP should happen within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load to ensure a decent UX.
First Input Display
(FID)
Interactivity is measured using the First Input Display (FID). Pages should have a FID of less than 100 milliseconds to give a decent user experience.
Culmative Layout Shift (CLS)
Visual stability is measured by Culmative Layout Shift (CLS). Pages with a CLS of less than 0.1 should deliver an excellent user experience.
The Impact On Revenue & Conversions
As these digestible data from Chromium Blog & Google AI Blog reveal, there is a considerable correlation between UX and conversion rates, according to Google and industry research:
- For every 1 second increase in page load time, conversion rates decline by 12%.
- The conversion rate for pages that loaded in 2.4 seconds was 1.9 percent.
- The conversion rate was 1.5 percent at 3.3 seconds.
- And conversion was less than 1% at 4.2 seconds.