After UX Improvements, how long until Ranking Changes?

[dipper]

Over the last 2 months we've made a number of improvements in the UX on our website, most notably:-

- moved website to local region hosting + removed/stopped Cloudflare (as it now seems to be semi-useless in our region), resulting in our ttfb going from 1.4s, now 0.21s. Page load times from 4.64s, now 2.64s. DOM interactive from 3.01s, now 1.34s. On a big enough timeframe and sample to feel confident these are reasonably stable numbers (20 days ago).

- changed from a super top-heavy "advanced" menu with images, recommended products, video, etc to a more simple traditional menu (140 days ago).

- made massive changes to mobile version of website. While previous was passing all mobile tests, it wasn't as well planned out as it should have been, and now it is really simple and easy to use imho (30 days ago).

We've made these changes, progressively over the last few months, and seen no movement in rankings or changes whatsoever.

Regardless of our interaction and improvements for users - which we feel are great, and really worthwhile, I'm wanting to know specifically about Google rankings.

My questions .. are changes like this picked up on the fly, and re-ranked? or do UX changes like this need to be factored into a bigger manual-type of re-ranking/update? .. or are these kinds of UX improvements simply not worthy of consideration in a re-ranking?

[Peter_S]

Since Google often run tests, and change things, it became hard to tell what benefits or not, and when.

But since 6 years I am making web sites "professionally", and so paying more attention to ranking and all this kind of things. My "feeling" (no proof) is that you can start seeing the impact of significant improvement a first time roughly 90 days after the change, and a second impact 180 later.

Also, I remember a video or article from a Google, saying that it's at the scale of a year,that you can measure the positive impact of SEO.

[tangor]

Look back over your raw logs (if you have them) going back to just before the first major change. See what g's interaction with the site has been and see if there's any change in their activity with each of the known big change points. It might be something as simple as they see a site in constant flux and don't know how to rank it until it settles down.

There are also much larger and longer range updates to the basic ranking (corrections if you will) that seem to follow a semi annual pattern. I don't have chapter and verse to point to, but empirical observation seems to bear this out.

UX is part of the ranking suite but is not weighted against content. Your content will be the largest weight, followed by access and dependability, and of course, user satisfaction.