How To Keep Up With Google's Page Experience in 2023?

Beyond the informational value, the "page experience" of a mobile or desktop website is measured by a collection of signals that capture how people feel when navigating the site. For example, Core Web Vitals incorporates measures that gauge how quickly a website loads, how interactive it is, and how stable the visuals are in real life. It also includes Search signals mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and invasive interstitial standards.

Google still prioritises ranking sites with the most critical content, even if they have a poor user experience. Excellent user experience is not more important than good content. When there are several pages with a similar level of relevance, however, page experience may become a far more crucial factor in Search engine rankings.

Page Experience Signals

These indicators are critical for providing a positive search results page experience on Google. Therefore, Google's goal is to refresh these signals once a year.

Improving the overall quality of the page

Below are some tools to evaluate, track, and fine-tune your page's performance.

• Find out more about the resources available for monitoring and reporting Core Web Vitals. These instruments evaluate LCP, FID, and CLS.
• The Mobile-Friendly Test will help you determine whether your site is optimised for mobile users.
• Verify that there is a safe connection to your site. Learn how to protect your site using HTTPS if the page isn't provided over HTTPS.
• Be wary of interstitials that prevent users from reaching the content they came for
• Have a look at the Page Experience FAQs and Core Web Vitals.
• Figure out how AMP may enhance your page's usability.

What to do about page experience in 2023

In 2023, page experience will become an increasingly important factor in determining a website's ranking in search engine results. Here are some steps you can take to improve your website's page experience:

Utilise Priority Hints to accelerate your website

In April of last year, Chrome introduced Priority Hints, a new HTML feature that allows website owners to highlight the page's most vital resources. This is particularly beneficial for photos that produce the most contentful paint.

By default, all pictures on a page have a low loading priority. Before the page's first rendering, the browser cannot determine whether an image element will become the hero image or a little symbol in the website's footer.

Consequently, it is usual for LCP pictures to be first loaded with a low priority and then switched to a high priority later on. This indicates that the browser will wait longer before downloading the picture.

Conduct thorough site speed testing

There are several free website performance optimisation solutions accessible online. However, many tools based on Google's Lighthouse use simulated throttling, which might result in erroneous metric reporting. This also applies to the PageSpeed Insights service from Google.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Google introduced an experimental new statistic called Interaction to Next Paint in 2022. It monitors how long the page refreshes after a user interacts with it.

Frequently, a user interaction causes JavaScript to execute on the website, which modifies the HTML of the page. The browser must then render these page updates to show the changed content to the user.

Interaction to the next paint is designed to overcome two shortcomings of the First Input Delay metric:

• FID does not include processing time for user input
• FID only considers the first user interaction.

More than 90 percent of sites presently perform well on the First Input Delay indicator, a much higher proportion than for the other two Core Web Vitals. Therefore, INP may replace First Input Delay in the future since it gives a more accurate evaluation of a website's user experience.

Benefit from enhanced picture support in Safari

Downloading pictures consumes a significant amount of bandwidth; thus, browser developers are continually developing new image formats and platform capabilities. Unfortunately, it will be some time before all major web browsers support these functions.

Thankfully, Safari has made some development over the last year. Safari was the latest major web browser to support the new, more compact AVIF picture format. In addition, Safari today supports native image lazy loading by using the loading="lazy" attribute.

Recognise and remove render-blocking resources

Render-blocking resources may significantly slow down your website. For example, numerous CSS stylesheets and JavaScript requests block rendering, which means your website will not display any content until these files are received.

Google has begun developing enhanced tools to identify render-blocking items to assist website owners in minimising page load times. For example, the new Performance Insights tab in Chrome DevTools displays which requests are rendering-blocking.

Track Core Web Metrics over Time

Utilising a programme to monitor your website continually allows you to confirm that your performance improvements are practical and guarantees that you are notified if performance degrades. You may also examine previous test results to see what changed.

Summing up

In conclusion, keeping up with Google's page experience signals in 2023 is crucial for a website's search engine rankings. Utilising tools such as Priority Hints, thorough site speed testing, Interaction to Next Paint, enhanced picture support in Safari, and recognising and removing render-blocking resources are some of the steps that can be taken to improve your website's page experience. Tracking Core Web Metrics over time can help you monitor your website's performance and optimise it for the best user experience. Stay ahead of the game and give your website the best chance to succeed in search engine results in 2023.