1. What is the Google Page Experience update? When do I need to take action?

The Page Experience update will introduce brand new mobile focused ranking signals pitching your site against competitors’ sites for mobile friendliness, speed, security and usability.

For many sites, meeting the requirements of this update this will take some work, particularly with more complex investigations around Core Web Vitals.

With the update confirmed to be arriving in Summer 2021, there is only a short amount of time left to get Page Experience up to task and avoid playing catch-up. The time for action is now.

2. Why should I care about Core Web Vitals?

As a ranking factor, fixing Core Web Vitals issues could be the leg-up you’ve been waiting for to gain a competitive advantage.

Core Web Vitals issues can require in-depth analysis and investigation to identify and solve. This means a lot of sites currently have big issues which will begin to affect them in May.

It’s also important to approach Core Web Vitals from a user perspective. Google’s Core Web Vitals report is based on the ChromeUX report, which is composed from an aggregation of user data.

By improving our Core Web Vitals score, we can directly improve user experience so it’s not just a Google factor.

3. What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a collection of Google Web Vital metrics deemed critical to experience.

Google will be combining Core Web Vital Scores with other page experience metrics (e.g. mobile friendliness and HTTPS) to create a new user experience ranking signal in May 2021.

The Core Web Vitals are: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

4. Which Core Web Vital is the most important?

Each Core Web Vital is important in it’s own right. With that being said, the vital most important to a site likely depends on the niche – for example an informational site with no login and little user interaction may not report many issues with input delay (FID).

It’s also worth noting that, depending on implementation, it is also possible that optimisation focused on improving one Vital may benefit another- a crossover more likely to be seen for FID and LCP.

5. How can I improve my Core Web Vitals?

Some of the issues with the highest impact on Core Web Vitals are:

• Time to first byte
• Render-blocking resources
• Resource load times
• Elements loaded out of order

We keep these in mind when investigating, identifying and documenting the resources specific to our page types, allowing us to gain a micro view of each and create recommendations appropriately. We define a page type as those URLs that follow a specific structure or format. All blog posts would be defined as a single page type, as would all products on an e-commerce site.