Technology/Science
What You Need to Respond to the Google Page Experience Update in 2022 By David Freudenberg
AUGUST 2021 IS THE MONTH Google changed forever—that is, if you own a website. The Google page experience update rolled out for mobile devices, shocking business owners who were not prepared. Google announced that the update was coming, but few were prepared. An analysis of 5 million desktop and mobile pages before the update found the average time it takes a website to load on mobile is 27.3 seconds. John Mueller, senior webmaster trends analyst at Google, says the best practice is to have your website load in two to three seconds. With an average load time of 27.3 seconds on mobile, websites were not even close to being prepared. Websites that did not prepare lost tons of traffic and money. Now Google announced the page experience update is coming to desktop devices in February 2022. Once again, websites are not prepared. The average load time of websites on desktop devices is 10.3 seconds— still a far cry from the Google recommended two to three seconds.
How to respond to the 2022 update What can you do to adjust your website in response to this update? The answer is to make adjustments based on what we know from the last one. Page experience for desktop devices uses the same ranking factors that influenced the last page experience update for mobile. These ranking factors are: • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). • First Input Delay (FID). • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). • HTTPS security. 104
March April 2022
•
Absence of intrusive interstitials.
Measure the performance of your website’s page experience ranking factors by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
How to improve your website’s LCP Largest Contentful Paint is a metric used by Google’s Core Web Vitals to measure the time it takes for the content on the page to first become visible. Excellent user experience starts at an LCP of two seconds or less. Websites with a slow LCP could be improved by making the following adjustments: • Increase the speed of server response times. • Defer any noncritical JavaScript and CSS. • Optimize resource-heavy elements affecting load time.
How to improve your website’s FID First Input Delay is a metric used by Google’s Core Web Vitals to measure the time it takes a page to respond when someone clicks on the page. Google-owned web.dev recommends that a website’s FID load in 100 milliseconds or less. Heavy JavaScript is the most common issue for websites with a slow FID. When the browser of your website is busy loading JavaScript, it cannot respond to user interactions, causing a negative user experience. Help the browser load JavaScript faster to improve the FID: • Use code-splitting to break up long JavaScript execution tasks. • Optimize the interaction readiness of the page.
DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
