Google "Page Experience Update" now rolling out

[sk7411]

System: The following 4 messages were cut out of "Core Updates Thread" at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5037667.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:16 pm PT on Jun 15, 2021 - (PDT -8)



FYI , Page experience update is now slowly rolling out:...

Google Search Central - Twitter
https://twitter.com/googlesearchc/status/1404886100087246848 [twitter.com]

The page experience update is now slowly rolling out (Top Stories will begin using this new signal by Thursday). It will be complete by the end of August 2021.

More here:
More time, tools, and details on the page experience update
[developers.google.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:27 pm (utc) on Jun 15, 2021]
[edit reason] Added context and formatting for links [/edit]

[robzilla]

Doubtful. The effects of the Page Experience Update will be minor. What you describe is probably due to a different update.

Google is using its klout to speed up solving them

Yep. We saw it with HTTPS, SPDY/HTTP2, and now with the Core Web Vitals. For the most part, this benefits all of us.

[Kendo]

A good web dev uses place holder

Anyone care to elaborate?

[NickMNS]

Anyone care to elaborate?

As was explained CLS is caused when new content is added to an already rendered page and then pushes the rendered content down. This causes the page to re-render. So to avoid this if you know the size of the content to be added, you can add a div to the page pre-sized to size of the added content. Thus when it is added it doesn't cause the re-flow (re-render).

Example you will show a 300px tall ad. So you add a div called "ad-wrapper" to the page and you set it's height of the div to 300px. You then place the ad code in that div. When the page loads without the ads you will see a blank slot, but when the ad loads it will fill the slot without the re-render.

Note, I believe that Adsense does this already for you with responsive ads but you can check with page speed insights. It tells you explicitly which elements on the page are causing CLS and why.

[Kendo]

Example you will show a 300px tall ad. So you add a div called "ad-wrapper" to the page and you set it's height of the div to 300px.

But when the browser window is resized or bootstrap rescales the image for mobile devices, that div height calculation will be complex. Different browsers and different devices can be a problem.

[NickMNS]

Different browsers and different devices can be a problem.

Yes but your "placeholder" doesn't need to have the same height across all devices and screen sizes. It simply needs to match the height of it's future children and not resize once rendered. You can also set the size within bounds such that the height can be say 500px for screen width from 320 to 640. Then if for 360 screen the eventual child only has height of 300px you can center it vertically within that div. Then if for width 600px the height is 500 than no centering is required anymore. But in both cases no reflow of the page was triggered. How you go about achieving this is specific to your layout. It can certainly be challenging, specially if your using something like Wordpress and have little web design experience.

Moreover this does solve issues caused by fonts resizing which is a whole other issue with similar impacts.

[nomis5]

Just checked my Core Web Vitals score in Google Search Console.

As at 19th June for mobile it shows:
0 Red URLs (poor URLs)
490 Orange URLs (need improvement)
70 Green URLs (good)

As at 1st July for mobile it shows:
0 Red URLs (poor URLs)
0 Orange URLs
561 Green URLs.

And the pre 19th June score remained almost exactly the same back to 13th April.
And the post 1st July score is almost the same up to now.

Just to be clear the pre 19th Orange URLs were not on the borderline of Orange / Green, they were smack bang in the middle of the Orange zone.

Within 10 days my website has gone from predominantly Orange URLs to 100% Green URLs.

Within that timeframe I probably made very minor updates to 30 pages at most.

As best as I can tell, the change in score has had zilch effect on my rankings.

CONCLUSION - Core Web Vitals sore is a load of old nonsense. It has such a minor influence on how a site ranks as to be almost zero.
AND - why has the score for my website changed at all? Nothing I have done could possibly result in such a dramatic change in score

[Dimitri]

Nothing I have done could possibly result in such a dramatic change in score

Google is refining its thresholds, once in a while : [support.google.com...]

Then it takes some days, or weeks to collect the data witht the new thresholds.

Add to this that if your pages include external elements (ads, images, videos, etc...) they impact your Core web vitals.

[NickMNS]

I was wondering:
"Page experience" is focused almost entirely on the initial page load, some metrics stretch past the "on load" event but it is still relative to the greater loading process. Does page interaction performance have any impact? Like if you are firing a bunch of "onscroll" events and it slows a page down for the user, making all janky. Clearly it would be poor UX, but does/can Google measure that directly?

[robzilla]

I think right now Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is the only measurement that extends beyond the load event. To measure such things as smoothness of interactions or animations, the Frame Timing API [w3c.github.io] is in the works. Other than that, I'm not sure. Things like popups/modals (including cookie notices) usually don't cause a layout shift, but they certainly have an impact on the user experience, and I don't think they're covered right now.

[Kendo]

I recently moved our main site to a brand new dedicated server that provides HTTP2, 2 times more ram and 2 times more processing power, with a 1TB/sec (x10 more) connection based in Fremont CA... and page speed/vitals has not improved.

[robzilla]

1TB/s? I highly doubt that :-)

Anyway, better hardware doesn't automatically improve page speed. A 1Gbps isn't any faster than a 100Mbps connection if you're not saturating it or serving large files to clients with high-speed connections. Your users won't notice the difference downloading relatively small files like HTML, scripts, stylesheets and images, unless, of course, they collectively reach that 100Mbps limit.

Same goes for RAM and CPU, although that can have some effect on the TTFB. HTTP/2 will make a bit of a difference, but it depends on the page.

There are lots of variables that go into page speed. If your pages are bloated, your backend inefficient, or your users far away from the server, you can throw the most expensive hardware at it and still not notice much of an improvement.

First step of improving your page speed and Core Web Vitals is knowing what your bottlenecks are.

[engine]

For reference, Google says its Page Experience update is is now complete.

The page experience rollout is complete now, including updates to Top Stories mobile carousel. Changes to Google News app have started to rollout as well and will be complete in a week or so.

[twitter.com...]

[Broaster]

Im guessing I was hit with page experience penalty because during the Core update is when I lost all my traffic and my articles no longer appeared in top stories when id search the title. My articles no longer rank in google news either when I search my title I have to put sort by date again.

The problem is knowing how to fix this, I been told to look at Core Vitals and then Page experience but Google doesnt really tell you much

[yollo03]

I became kind of an expert in the core web vitals. My score for desktop is 100 for almost all pages, for mobile its around 95 - 97. I can tell you though the core web vitals have zero impact in my niche. All the top competitors have poor web vitals (below 50) and are ranking very well. So I wouldn't blame the drop in ranking on the web vitals.

If you want to work on it though, its all about js and css.