If you are someone using the WordPress website, then here is the chance to maximize the probability of your website’s ranking. Google has brought its Page Experience Update in May 2021, which is a bunch of new signals that will benefit your WordPress website to a great extent. Google comes up with regular changes in its algorithms, which on one side benefits a lot of sites, but on the other hand, also hurts the rankings of some websites.
Due to the prevailing and stressful situation with Coronavirus, Google has been delaying this update for a year. This has given enough time to the webmasters to plan ahead of time.
Any digital marketer would want its website to rank higher on the search engine pages, thus it has to comply with the changing algorithms by Google to keep the WordPress site “up” in the category. This article is all about the Google Page Experience Update and how it will enhance your WordPress website’s metrics to fetch you higher rankings in 2021.
The page experience comprises several factors like page speed update, safe browsing, mobile-friendly update, HTTPS ranking boost, penalty, usability, and speed. These are Google’s basic vitals and by this, they determine how the users perceive a particular web page. With the new update, Google will use a set of signals to determine the same. These signals are page loading speed, mobile friendliness, how the content plays after the page loads, and the ability to run on HTTPS.
Google rolled out its latest SEO algorithm in May 2021 and called it the Google Page Experience update. The whole idea of this Page Experience ranking factor is to arrange the websites that offer a great user experience with the help of five main signals. Note here, that the aim is not to see how the content is, but how the user experience is. This update wants the user to have a good experience on the websites ranking higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
The primary focus of Google’s new SEO algorithm revolves around the five signals that are discussed below:
Your website must not have any issues with the mobile-friendly design, otherwise, it will get highlighted in the Google Search Console or Google Mobile-friendly Test Tool. Check with the Mobile Usability report for your website to detect any issues with the mobile-friendliness of your site. This report will highlight the issues and URLs that are in question.
These are the newest performance metrics that aim at the connection between the performance of the website and the user experience. These metrics are – FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). Make sure you look for both desktop and mobile results for the Core Web Vitals metrics.
This signal will check if the website uses HTTPS and has an SSL certificate.
This signal will check for any deceitful content, malware problems, dangerous and risky downloads, or other issues highlighted by the Google Search Console.
It checks if your website sends obtrusive and nosy popups to the mobile users who are using the Google search. Such pop-ups are irritating and make the content less accessible mainly while using the mobile. This is because a big part of the screen gets covered by the popup and offers a bad user experience.
To enhance the search rankings of the website, the developers and people related to optimization strategies must ensure that they take this new update very seriously. Google is going to give supreme weightage to the page experience in this current update because it knows that an alluring page attracts maximum visitors and enhances engagement. In case your website’s user experience is one of the best, the visual signals will pilot the browser and users to your page.
The web pages that are not able to meet the new demands set by Google will lag in the rankings, even if till now they were ranking higher. Thus, it will lead to lesser traffic to the website. Along with considering various other factors to decide the rankings, the page experience signal will help it to guide the users and get them the desired information quickly. Thus, the designers, developers, and marketers must take it seriously and on priority, otherwise, their website will be ignored and lost in the crowd.
Here are some of the initial steps that you as developers or stakeholders can take to prepare your website for the update rollout in May 2021.
Mobile devices contribute almost 50% of the website traffic in the last three years. Google’s algorithm makes use of the website’s mobile version to rank the pages from the website. Thus, it is critical to get your website mobile-ready by minimizing the code, enhancing browser caching, and lowering redirects. The design of the mobile webpage should be crisp, simple, and responsive on smaller displays. It is also critical to work on the structure of the website for mobile devices.
Even a small delay of one second in page loading can minimize the rate of conversion by 70%. It is pretty frustrating to lose out just in a matter of one second, so it is ideal to minimize the HTTPS requests. You can use the top to the bottom approach of the browser to enhance the page loading speed by using asynchronous loading files. You must also look at other factors like JavaScript loading, the response time of the servers, caching, compression, file size of the images, etc.
Enhancing the page speed and optimizing the website for mobile are the basic requisites to alleviate the user experience to great heights. One more factor is the Call-to-Action (CTA) of a website or page. All the websites have CTAs on some of the other pages where the visitors are required to take some action, like subscribing for updates, asking for an appointment, signing up, making purchases, etc. Users are usually in a hurry or sometimes not patient at such times, thus the websites must work well on their CTAs. The CTAs must be specific, short, and quickly understandable. Moreover, the CTA must have a benefit to follow to lure the customer into clicking on them. Even the positioning of CTAs must be taken care of so that they are correctly shaped and positioned.
To know the function and appearance of an image on a page, use Alt Text. in case the image file is not loaded on the page, the alt tags will help the users understand the context of that image. The search engine algorithms also check for such descriptions for indexing purposes. If you have used Alt Text for your images on the website, you can rank up higher in the result pages. Only make sure the alt text descriptions are specific, short, and have a keyword.
Google has planned a rollout of its latest algorithm in May 2021 and included another factor called the Page Experience. Apart from using the existing Google Search signals like safe browsing, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and intrusive pop ups, it will also focus on the user experience on a particular page or website to determine the rankings on the search page. It will also comprise Google’s Web Vitals for checking the loading speed of the site, its stability, and interactivity.
The developers and site owners must not ignore the latest update and try to understand these signals mentioned above to rank its website higher on the search engine result pages.
Start working on your websites even if they are currently ranking higher to make them comply with the latest Google Page Experience Update.
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