Released in mid 2021, Page Experience is a tool to measure mobile user’s satisfaction with your content. Page Experience does this by tracking a set of core web vitals: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. These vitals essentially track how much time a mobile user has to spend waiting on your site to present itself and how hard it is to read it. These parts have always been important, the average person will have about 8 or 9 seconds of patience with your site before moving on to find what they’re looking for, so first impressions matter. With a desktop version of Page Experience now integrated, using this tool is more useful than ever.
So how do you make the most of this? To start with, your loading times should be fast. You should shoot for 2.5 LCP or less. You can do this by optimizing your images and condensing your JavaScript files. This isn’t always enough, however. Sometimes the fault will lie with the hosting service you’re using. If you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work, it might be time to switch hosts. Next up is interactivity. This is measured in First Input Delay (FID). You should be shooting for an FID of less than 100 milliseconds, though this number can depend on the kind of page the user is on. The best way to decrease your FID is to rely less on JavaScript files. Finally, we have Visual Stability, which is measured through Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This detects how much the website elements move around the page, the more the worse. You want a CLS of 0.1 or less. While it is harder to detect reasons for bad CLS scores, slow user computers and poor internet connection are problems that you ultimately cannot control that never the less will affect CLS. What you can control are how your web font renders and properly defining your image borders.
In the roughly two years since its mobile introduction and one year since its desktop debut, Page Experience has proven itself to be a vital tool for any SEO analysis. It serves as a potent tool for those who really want to grab a potential reader’s attention and avoid a janky experience.
4 Responses
That’s super cool, I didn’t know about this tool. Excited to see how people start using it.
This tool is very helpful! I have used it before and it was very impactful to making my site more accessible for people when they visit my site.
Interesting, I was sure a metric like this existed but i didn’t know what it was called, good to know!
Informative post! I didn’t realize the importance of Page Experience in measuring user satisfaction. It’s fascinating how it tracks loading, interactivity, and visual stability. The tips provided for optimization are valuable. Thanks for sharing!