If you\u2019re looking for the main SEO tips and best practices to get ready for the Page Experience Update, this is the right article for you. <\/p>
In particular, you may be wondering how the Core Web Vitals will affect SEO performance and what you should pay attention to when optimizing your WordPress site.<\/p>
We asked some SEO experts and WordPress partners to share their thoughts, expectations, and recommendations around the Google Page Experience Update.<\/p>
Keep reading, and you\u2019ll likely get answers to your main questions!<\/p>
The Page Experience Update focuses on delivering a better user experience through five signals: mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS usage, no intrusive interstitials on mobile devices, and Core Web Vitals.<\/p>
While the first four signals are pretty well-known for a long time, the Core Web Vitals<\/a> are additional metrics that focus on how well users can interact with the page. Here\u2019s why the three Core web Vitals metrics focus on:<\/p> The new SEO ranking factor will start rolling out in mid-June 2021. What\u2019s reasonable to expect?<\/p> According to Jono Alderson of Yoast<\/a>, there won\u2019t be a huge change overnight. \u201cSlow websites will continue to be slow. Businesses that have already been investing in providing good user experiences will continue to reap the rewards\u201d, he says. \u201cIn the longer term, however, I think we\u2019ll see a trend where <\/strong>legacy, large, and slow businesses finally start to invest in performance. Now we have formal metrics and a direct line between performance and revenue<\/strong>; until now, that connection has always been a bit too ephemeral. Companies have to move quickly, though. User expectations around speed will continue to increase as the web gets faster, and delivering slow experiences will harm the bottom line\u201d.<\/p> The close relationship between the user experience, performance, and revenue is what Joe Williams of TribeSEO<\/a> also highlights:<\/p> Faster pages can help with better user experience, converting more visitors into customers and higher ranked pages on Google.<\/p><\/blockquote> He then agrees with Jono: \u201cIt appears the ranking signal will be slight at first, but I\u2019d imagine it will become more significant on Google over time\u201d. <\/p> Google should not be the only reason for optimizing web performance and delivering a better UX. However, many companies have started to pay more attention since Google announced the Google Page Experience update 2021<\/a>.<\/p> Adam Connell of Startup Bonsai<\/a> points out: \u201cA focus on improving Core Web Vitals can only be a good thing. But we shouldn\u2019t do this just for Google. We should do it because it makes good sense from a business perspective. Better UX is equal to more revenue<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p> He shares his take about the overall expectation: \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to this update because it may encourage legacy sites to work on their UX. I expect that this update will be similar to when page speed was introduced as a ranking factor. Particularly in the sense that while the overall ranking gains for great page speeds are minimal, terribly slow page load times can be quite a detractor\u201d.<\/p> Not doing everything to only please Google is also the take of Patrick Valibus and Thomas Taschereau of the SEO Agency 410Gone<\/a>: \u201cA website owner should take care of its users no matter what Google or other companies say. It\u2019s not the first try of Google to tell everybody to improve their website experience, but this one seems to work finally. Unfortunately, it seems to work because of fear but not because of common sense. For instance, we\u2019ve known for years now that a website should answer very fast to the first request for Google\u2019s bot. So, the Time to First Byte (TTFB) is not a new metric, even though it\u2019s not included in the scary KPI that Google announced. The real change for this update will be at a bounce rate level. <\/strong>The Core Web Vitals metrics focus on displaying fast the information that will help users understand they\u2019re on the right page. Once they know that, they will be more likely to wait for generation and complex content.\u201d If your business or website focuses on providing a faster and safer experience to the users, you\u2019ll get a benefit from the Google Page Experience update.<\/p><\/blockquote> When getting your WordPress site ready for the Page Experience update, there are several things to pay attention to.<\/p> One of them is the WordPress theme to use<\/strong>. Joe says: \u201cBack in December, we launched a new version of our website. It\u2019s still on WordPress, but it <\/strong>uses Oxygen Builder as the page builder\/theme because its code is incredibly lean, and it helps with all Core Web Vitals metrics\u201d.<\/p> According to Anil, there are also other aspects to keep in mind, such as:<\/p> Patrick adds: \u201cSince most of our clients are e-business owners, we\u2019re used to setting up Varnish for their website and powerful hosting. The main focus is to render the main content faster and improve the Largest Contentful Paint grade<\/a>\u201d. <\/p> He also shares an interesting point about using JavaScript: \u201cFor years everybody was used to enjoy more powerful computers so using big JS library was not a problem. Now we start to challenge some features and ask if they\u2019re necessary and if we should integrate JS on each page\u201d.<\/p> Since JS can affect metrics such as the First Input Delay<\/a>, it\u2019s a good question you should also ask yourself.<\/p> Joe also highlights the role of JS, alongside other web performance aspects: \u201cOptimizing for page speed requires a lot of trials and errors. Much depends on server-side scripts like PHP and SQL from themes, page builders, plugins, and client-side scripts like JavaScript. So, to win at Core Web Vitals and page speed, you need to have fast loading scrips which means being selective in how your website is built right from the get-go\u201d.<\/p> Amir Helzer of WPML<\/a> and Toolset<\/a> also mentions the number of plugins running on his sites: \u201cIn our experience, reducing the use of plugins helped improve performance significantly\u201d.<\/p> Let\u2019s now dive into the performance details! We investigated the main difficulties related to improving Core Web Vitals for better SEO performance. As you\u2019ll see, there is a metric that stands out the most.<\/p> Thomas says: \u201cThe hardest metric to improve is the TTFB. The server needs to respond fast with no delay. Depending on the framework, it can be difficult to reduce the server response times<\/a>\u201d. <\/p> As you may already know, the Time to First Byte is crucial to improve the Largest Contentful Paint<\/a>.<\/p> Thomas also explains that a particular challenge comes from the eCommerce sites<\/strong>, which are the hardest to improve. \u201cThey have dynamic and fast-changing pages. Products and category pages can change very often and make caching hard to use. Big shop catalogs can create problems of their own. Filtering and displaying the product can be resource-intensive and increase the Time to First Byte\u201d.<\/p> Adam agrees that the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is by far the most challenging metric to improve<\/strong>. When it comes to the other two Core Web Vitals, powerful hosting and the right WordPress themes help. \u201cI use WordPress to power all of my sites which makes things a lot easier. I use lightweight and well-maintained themes such as Astra and Kadence. Together with high-performance hosting, this makes First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) pretty easy to get right. Especially because we don\u2019t run ads\u201d.<\/p> The Largest Contentful Paint is the main challenge for Anil, too: <\/p> We always find it difficult to manage our LCP as we use a ton of images, graphics, and illustrations on our blog posts. If you\u2019re also someone who uses a lot of images, I\u2019d recommend you to go with a premium caching plugin like WP Rocket as it helps with better page loading times and other features like page caching and lazy loading.<\/p><\/blockquote> Amir also agrees on the most difficult Core Web Vitals score to optimize: \u201cFor our sites, the biggest challenge is dealing with the Largest Contentful Paint<\/strong>. The reason was that we used too many plugins, which were all loading resources on all the site\u2019s pages. Some were small and some large. When we cleaned up these resources, our site loaded fast\u201d.<\/p> \ud83d\udca1 Tip: Speaking of improving the site\u2019s performance, Joe explains that preloading the hero image on the homepage helped boost the LCP grade. \u201cIn addition to preloading the hero image on our homepage, what helped us improve the score were deferring JavaScript and upgrading our web host.<\/strong> Deferring JavaScript also helped massively with improving the <\/strong>Time to Interactive score<\/a>. Now, Tribe SEO\u2019s homepage fluctuates between scoring 99 and 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights mobile test\u201d.<\/p> On the other hand, for Jono, improving Cumulative Layout Shift<\/a> seems to be pretty challenging: \u201cIf you\u2019re building a site from scratch, it\u2019s relatively easy to achieve perfect scores on each metric. But if you\u2019re retrofitting or optimizing an existing stack, things can be much messier. For complex sites with lots of resources and dependencies, I usually find that perfecting CLS is the hardest challenge, especially when JavaScript files and fonts are loaded inefficiently, media isn\u2019t served correctly, and render-blocking assets make things behave unpredictably during load!\u201d.<\/p> Let\u2019s now see what you should never forget to pay attention to improve Core Web vitals.<\/p> According to Thomas, users should not overlook the performance techniques that help optimize LCP in the first place: lazyloading<\/a>, preloading, inlining critical CSS<\/a>, and starting to render only the first visible page content.<\/p> Amir also highlights the power of lazyloading: \u201cWe moved Google Tag Manager to lazy load. This made all the heavy scripts for Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and others load after the page\u2019s rendering\u201d.<\/p> According to Jono, another overlook optimization are fonts<\/strong>: \u201cSo many sites load fonts inefficiently. If you\u2019re just importing from Google Fonts, chances are you\u2019re impacting all of your CWV metrics. To iron out the kinks, you need to get into the details of which font families, weights, and styles you\u2019re loading, the specific glyph sets you need, and the loading method; as well as juggling pre-loading and browser-specific formats\u201d.<\/p>
Speaking of the other Page Experience signals, Anil Agarwal of BloggersPassion<\/a> says: \u201cI think the Google Page Experience update is going to help users with safe and mobile-friendly browsing. Google\u2019s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and helpful. If you keep that one thing in mind, you\u2019ll not be worrying much about Google\u2019s latest updates”. And he adds:<\/p>How to Get Ready For the New SEO Ranking Factor Rolling Out<\/h2>
Improving Core Web Vitals for SEO: What\u2019s the Most Challenging Metric?<\/h2>
What Should You Not Overlook When Optimizing the Core Web Vitals?<\/h2>