Bloggers are passionate about growing their reader base and achieve a good ranking on search pages. Multiple factors determine the visibility, traffic, and ranking of your blog. Following the latest Google guidelines and algorithms can increase your chances of ranking higher on intended keywords. In this blog, we are going to discuss the upcoming Google Metric called Google Page Experience. It will help you to match your site against this metric and work on the areas that need improvement.
Google’s Chrome team launched some Core Web Vitals in 2020 and the Google Page Experience is the latest metric based on these vitals.
The main aim of rolling out this new metric is to provide a secured and to-the-point experience especially for mobile internet users.
User experience as mentioned in Core Web Vitals
Along with developing Core Web Vitals the last year Google also created Chrome User Experience Report. The former has already been explained while the latter will help the publishers and interested parties to precisely check how their site matches against these new metrics and the areas of improvement.
Core Web Vitals contain 3 key signals depicting the overall user experience
- Largest Contentful Paint for measuring the loading agility of the largest piece of content. It should ideally be below 2.5 seconds
- First Input Delay to check How quickly your site responds to scrolling, clicking, and typing. The ideal level for this metric is less than 100ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift for measuring the visual steadiness of your site its ideal score should be below 0.1
Experience of mobile users
Keeping the interests of the ever-growing population of mobile internet users, Google takes the best measures to promote a mobile-friendly browsing experience by preparing relevant guidelines for websites and taking corrective actions against the defaulters.
Mobile experience like speed, responsiveness, etc. plays a vital role in Google’s perception while ranking the sites. It is but natural that it has now rolled out this new metric that further refines the overall user experience by adding advanced points like the display of the largest content and site responsiveness to user interaction.
Secured Browsing Experience
As the most trusted search engine, Google understands its responsibility and does everything to protect users from landing on insecure sites that may contain viruses or have malicious intentions behind them.
The newest page experience metric contain strong signals to suggest the presence of potentially harmful elements on a site like spyware, malware, or even the content of deceptive character or false information.
It can also detect social engineering scams.
Note for bloggers and review sites: One thing to keep in mind is that while creating sponsored posts on your blog or writing sponsored reviews many bloggers may veer to exaggerate and it may sometimes amount to misinformation. To stay on the safe side it is very important to review such blogs and revise them if necessary. AN easy way to do it is to go to Google’s Security Issues report and evaluate your website/post content to ensure that you are precisely following the ideal guidelines.
SSL Certificate to avoid misuse of users’ data by cyber attackers
Another step taken by Google to ensure secure browsing is to promote the healthy practice of converting HTTP sites to HTTPS sites which are more secured for sharing information. The basic difference between the two is that unlike HTTP sites, the HTTPS websites encrypt any information shared by the users which means that such data is masked with coded language that can only be deciphered by the intended receiver of the message, i.e., the server. So in case of a cyber attack, the data thieves won’t be able to understand the masked information or misuse it.
When a visitor opens any website the chrome browser also shows the quick signal near the address bar indicating whether or not the site is safe for sharing information. A green signal or padlock near HTTPS sites tells that it is a safe connection while there are a clear signal near HTTP (non SSL) sites indicating that the connection isn’t secured by SSL.
- Important tip
You can easily get an SSL certificate and the basic version is available free of costs. The majority of reputed hosting providers can offer you SSL certificates as a part of the hosting package. In case you are still using an HTTP blog then you can easily get an SSL certificate without any external help. Just follow this link : https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/ and you can check the instruction on how to get SSL certificate
Uninterrupted reading and browsing experience
The new metric also contains a signal to expose the publishers whose sites are architected to prevent users from quickly viewing the information they searched for.
Many websites come with pop-ups for showing third-party ads, the latest discount offers, etc. If such popup misses easy dismissing options, constantly interrupts between browsing session and cover a large part of your page content, then new metric will treat you as a defaulter.
Even if we don’t consider the latest metric, pop-ups are the least welcome elements for visitors. They interrupt their reading experience and may even defeat the very objective of your blog and its content. So, it is advisable to avoid pop-ups as much as you can or at least use them sparingly and time it wisely for instance using intent-based pop-ups like collecting email addresses or showing a special offer just about the time the user is intending to leave your site.
Remove any heavy pop-ups, images, or other elements from your blog that slow down the speed. Make it a habit to constantly review the current usability of your plugins and remove the ones that you don’t use anymore.
Conclusion
This year Google is coming with a new metric called Google Page Experience that will focus on the web page experience of any site. In this blog, we presented the details about this new metric and also suggested the right actions to take for assuring that your blog shouldn’t be considered as a defaulter under the new metric. Readers are advised to continuously update themselves with any new change that might be added to this metric until the time it is officially implemented.