You may have not heard about it yet, but from next year (2021) Google is going to be using ‘Page Experience’ to rank your website.
*Update February 2021 – Google is changing the algorithm in May 2021. If you don’t update your website; potentially you will lose 50% of your mobile traffic.
This is an interesting move as it’s the first time Google is acknowledging that they take user experience over backlinks, or even all those tags that you’ve added. We’re not saying just remove all those features and concentrate purely on the design. You still have to do those parts in the backend of your website, but be aware that you now need to work on your design even more!
Here is what Google has to say about it…
“The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.”
– https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html
So what does that actually mean?
Put simply, Google are looking for how usable your website is to users browsing your website.
How can I optimise my website for user experience?
1: Loading Speed ‘I feel the need the need for speed’ – as Tom cruise would say…
Speed is important. The faster your website is the better the experience is for users, as they’re not waiting around for a page to load; resulting in more time being spent browsing.
There are a number of tools where you can check your website speed:
GT Metrix, Pingdom & Google Page Speed insights
The faster your website loads the better ‘Page Experience’ your users are going to have. Ideally your website should load in under 3 seconds, for both desktop and mobile. If it doesn’t, GT Metrix & Google Page speed insights will give you some recommendations. Need help to understand these recommendations?
2: Mobile Responsive
Does your website work on mobile? This is an important factor with more and more users using their mobile devices to search and use websites. It’s fundamental that your website works on mobile devices; otherwise known as ‘responsive website design’. Have you been on a website where you’re having to scroll endlessly or pinch and zoom just to read the content, then just left without viewing any other pages? That is poor page experience.
Google has a tool where you can check to see if your website is mobile friendly – https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
If your website isn’t mobile responsive, you’ll likely be losing customers. You may need to consider creating a separate mobile website, or even a whole re-design of your existing site.
If you are running a WordPress website and your website isn’t responsive, you should consider WP-Touch. WP-Touch will try and change your content and present it to mobile devices; this is a great way if you don’t have a lot of budget for a whole re-design.
3: Website Security
“Security… “ You might ask “what do you mean by this?” You must have a secure website if you want to rank near the top of Google. You’ve got to keep hackers away and stop them installing malicious content on your website. By keeping your website secure you will give your users a safe user experience; which is what Google want you to do. Not only that, users are well aware of the risks online, and they’re precious about their data (and rightly so); so security is paramount on a site.
The best way to do this is to install an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate on your website. With some hosts these are free and you can use ‘letsencrypt’, or you can purchase an SSL certificate separately. Either way, an SSL certificate will make your website secure and customers are more likely to trust your website when you have a padlock on the internet browser.
Having an SSL certificate will help keep malicious content away from your website and boost your SEO ranking.
4: Website Design
Design is one of the most important factors to ‘Page Experience’. We eat with our eyes first and a poorly designed website will cost you customers and revenue. But where to start? What does ‘good design’ mean?
Try to understand your customers requirements and what they want. One potential way of looking at your design is by using a heat map on your website. Allowing you to see what customers are viewing on your website on any page. Crazyegg allows you to do this. All you have to do is install some code within your website and it will allow you to track what people are viewing by their mouse patterns. Once you have this data you will be able to see which elements of your website need improvements.
There are also some fundamental website design principles to bear in mind and factors that you can consider:
- Have one colour for CTAs (call-to-action) on your website and don’t use it for anything else. An example might be a newsletter sign-up or ‘buy now’ button.
- Move your users around the website seamlessly; ideally you want users to find what they want within 3-4 clicks. Make a user journey as short and easy to navigate as possible.
- Keep your website consistent. Having a consistent page layout is beneficial and it won’t lead to confusion for users.
- Make buttons on your website look clickable. If you don’t give enough space for buttons, how are your users meant to click onto other content.
- Have a lot of content on your website? Use accordions. Users on mobile don’t want endless scrolling.
If you want to learn more about ‘Page Experience’ and how it will affect your website, or, how to maximise the effectiveness of your site for the future, drop us a message.
