How to Optimize for Google’s Page Experience Update

Content will always remain a priority for the giant search engine, but with this update, the company is trying to reward websites based on their technical performances and speed. Whether you run an eCommerce business, or you are into enterprise services or products, you have to optimize your website for this update and stay relevant in the optimization game.

If you are a new business owner or you are not aware of what you need to do for optimizing your website, then we have got you covered. In this article, we will walk you through the best seven tips and tactics that you can use to optimize your website and always have a competitive edge.

Regardless of your website’s niche and size, these tips will help you get going with the latest updates seamlessly.

1. Preload key resource

The first tip to get started for this update is to ensure your website preloads the important resources to offer a good user experience.

LCP or what’s known as the Largest Contentful Paint is the key indicator that will help you understand how fast and accurately your website is able to preload the important resources. You need to ensure that all the main on-page elements load seamlessly.

For identifying what a particular page’s LCP element is, you need to inspect the page and navigate to the Performance tab of Chrome. There, you will find the waterfall chart that will give you all the important information that you need to optimize your website.

2. Optimize main threads

Optimizing the main thread activities is a crucial optimization step that will help you improve the website performance drastically. Sometimes a web page takes a huge time to load despite having a faster loading speed and it creates trouble in the long run. There are multiple issues that might cause substantial delays in loading the page once the user already arrives.

For identifying this, you need to check the FID or First Input Delay metric from Google’s Core Web Vitals that will give you an idea about those resources. You can reduce the waiting time by minifying the resources and eliminating the unnecessary elements that are making the website slower.

3. Space for images

You need to reserve space for images and embeds that you already have and the future ones that will be added to the website. It’s important that the visuals also load faster as soon as the user visits a web page. For checking this, you need to dive into the CLS metric or the Cumulative Layout Shift metric. It tells you the total amount that the graphical layout moves around as the page loads completely.

It happens quite a few times that you wanted to click on a button but by the page loads, you accidentally click on some other button. It’s frustrating to users, especially to the mobile users and the screen is already compact.

By going into the Chrome DevTools’ Performance tab option, you can see what are those sections and elements that move while the page loads.

4. Mobile-friendliness

This is a major ranking factor and it’s also common in Google’s Page Experience update.

You need to ensure that all pages are mobile-friendly and load faster as soon as users click on the link. Make sure that the HTML, WordPress, or any other template that you are using is optimized for mobile devices.

The template should be optimized for mobile devices and offer a seamless experience to the users.

Many website owners download free templates that are not fully optimized, and they degrade the overall performance of the website. So, if you plan to use a free template, ensure its fully optimized and works smoothly on mobile devices.

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5. Fix security issues

Security is a major concern for both search engines and the users and you can’t overlook it in 2021 and beyond. Google and other search engines always prefer to rank a website that’s safe to browse for the visitors.

So, it’s important that you audit the complete website for security issues and list down all the important considerations.

From securing the website with HTTPS to implementing a secure payment gateway, you need to make sure the website is protecting the users’ data in a 360° manner. Fix all the broken pages, and long redirects to ensure higher security for the visitors and your website.

With growing digitization, cyber-attacks are also growing and hence it becomes important to keep a check on security.

6. Forms and embedded resources

The majority of website owners will perform a security check, but they will overlook check the forms and embedded resources present on their website. It’s highly important that the external resources that you are using are safer and are running over an HTTPS protocol.

Website owners need to especially pay attention towards the forms as it collects users’ personal data to store on the website’s servers. Once you secure every touchpoint of your website, the chances of ranking in higher positions improve drastically.

7. Optimize interstitials

If you are running bigger banner ads, then you need to check whether they are blocking the crucial content or not.

The ads should be optimized in such a manner that they should not block any kind of crucial content that users need to know.

Be it in desktop mode or mobile mode, you need to make sure that the important content is visible clearly and the ads are not blocking it in any manner. Once you ensure that, your website becomes highly optimized for this important page experience update.

These were the top seven tips and tactics that you can use to optimize your website for better Google’s page experience update. Follow these tips step by step and get ahead of the competition.

About the Author:

With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.