Loading speed, seamless interactions, and visual stability – user experience is becoming a significant factor for search engine discoverability alongside technical implementation and content.
Google isn’t known for announcing its updates in advance. Now, Big G has kindly decided to inform about a somewhat significant update coming next year.
The reason for the pre-announcement is the COVID-19 situation. Google does not want to cause additional grey hairs for web service administrators during already challenging times and is therefore postponing the update to next year. This update seems quite straightforward.
"Evaluating page experience for a better web" – honouring the user experience
You can infer the update's guiding principle from the title quote: Google seems to give more weight to site speed and user experience in the future.
In this context, user experience can be divided into three clear components, which are worth monitoring in your own web service starting now.
Loading speed
Interactivity
Visual stability
This trinity relates to the recently released Core Web Vitals metrics, which are measures to analyse website usability mechanically.
Image: Google.
Loading speed of the web service (Largest Contentful Paint, LCP)
LCP stands for Largest Contentful Paint and measures the loading speed of the most important content on a web service. Research suggests that a web service should be operational and usable in approximately 2.5 seconds.
The initial important content, including images and videos, should be available relatively quickly, even if the page's "tail" is still loading in the background. This value does not refer to a 100% finished page, but to the time when the visitor has a ready and functional key content on the screen.
You can easily test your web service's loading speed with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. If the LCP score remains green, that is, under 2.5 seconds, the result is good.
Image above: If you are familiar with the PageSpeed Insights tool, you will notice changes in the metrics. The new metrics are labelled "Web Vitals".
Site interactivity (First Input Delay, FID)
It is important that the site responds quickly to user actions – the assumption is that when a person presses a button, things start to happen!
Delays before interactivity are measured by First Input Delay, FID. The value should remain under 100 milliseconds on an individual page.
In summary: there should not be noticeable delay in any user interactions.
Visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS)
I quote an animation from Google here, because it so clearly summarises the problem of unstable visual layout!
This concerns buttons and links that move around as the site loads.
You have probably encountered in mobile, a situation where a button escapes under your thumb or changes place just before pressing. It can be annoying at the least, but in online stores, shifting content on the screen can even lead to incorrect orders or cancellations.
The official term is Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS. The technique measures changes in the user interface; progressing in a shopping cart is a very practical example.
The most common reason for a jumping interface is content loading in the background, which changes the position of elements especially vertically. Technically, changes are relatively easy to measure, and consequently, a reasonable threshold value for CLS can be defined. An acceptable result on a scale of 0-1 is 0.1.
A fast web service and good user experience enhance search engine discoverability
Google ranks pages using several hundred algorithms. Site speed and mobility have been factors affecting site ranking for a long time, but now usability has also gained sensible metrics around it.
If – and when – the speed data of your web service interests you, you can perform a quick analysis in a few minutes as follows:
Go to Google's speed test here
Enter the address of the page to be tested and run the test.
The more green you see, the better your site looks in Google’s eyes.
From the "Recommendations" and "Diagnostics" listings, you can examine the causes of any slowdowns. Quite often the culprits are images and javascript.
It's impossible to provide a definitive correction guide, as everything depends on the platform and technologies used in the web service.
PS. / Editor's note / Final thoughts
What makes this update interesting is Google’s unusual pre-announcement: we live in peculiar times, but the update itself will also be impactful.
Even currently, most web services struggle with mobile speed – with the update, problems will likely become more pronounced, especially if the web service is extensive or technologically outdated.
One could argue that one could get by previous Google updates with slight adjustments and content production, but now many web services – especially e-commerce – might need to undergo a major overhaul.
But as before: keep calm, familiarize yourself with the topic, examine your pages, and ask the techies for more help if it gets beyond your grasp!
Crasman Ltd
8 Jun 2020
