Preparing for page experience ranking | Session

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi my name is jeffrey and i'm a product manager on search thank you all for joining and today i'll be walking you through the page experience ranking that's soon coming to google search and later nena will be joining to give us an update on how the amp team is setting developers up for success with this upcoming launch hi folks glad to be here google search has always considered user experience as part of ranking you'd remember some of our past efforts from 2014 where we announced mobile friendliness as a ranking signal the same year we also launched an effort to rank based on https to ensure web pages are delivered in a secure fashion to our users let's take a closer look into page experience when we think about page experience we think in terms of the four pillars of user experience they are loading which signifies how fast or slow the resources of the page is downloaded and displayed on user's browser user annoyance an important pillar that quantifies some of the web page behavior that might get in the way of a user accomplishing a task security and privacy a critical aspect of how safe secure and privacy friendly a web page is and accessibility the world health organization's disability health fact sheet finds that over a billion people about 15 percent of world's population have some form of disability we as web developers have a huge responsibility to build pages that are inclusive to all our users these four pillars provide a structure for how to think about page experience for your pages we believe when pages perform well on these they provide exceptional value to the users which can drive long-term relationship with your customers let's take a look at how these four pillars translate in practice for page experience for loading we use largest contentful paint and first input delay the largest contentful paint lcb for short is a metric that reports the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport relative to when the page first started loading first input delay fid for short measures the time from when a user first interacts with the page that is when they click on a link tap on a button or use a custom javascript powered control to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing the event handlers in response to that interaction for the user annoyance pillar we have cumulative layout shift cls cls measures the sum total of all the individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs on the page a layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next no abusive interstitials is an existing search ranking policy that an associated signal that we've long used on search that detects the presence and use of interstitials that are user hostile we've noticed that such interstitials are often used to trick users to doing something that they do not want to preventing them from reading or interacting with the page that they landed from google search there are a lot of great uses for interstitials such as the ones required by law gdpr consent is an example or an interstitial that shows updated business hours during the coronavirus pandemic those are not affected by the signal for security and privacy we want to ensure that the sites are delivered using the https protocol users should be able to confidently browse the internet without having to worry about man in the middle attack or improper impersonations safe browsing systems at google brings together decades worth of experience in identifying and mitigating web-based threats such as malware unwanted software downloads or social engineering similar to some of the other signals we've long been using safe browsing on search to warn users when we detect that they might be clicking on a potentially harmful site every user deserves to have a safe and secure browsing experience and these two signals work together to ensure that sites are good citizens on the internet the mobile friendliness signal covers the accessibility pillar which measures how effective the pages are on small screens often used by mobile phones the first three metrics largest contentful paint first input delay and cumulative layout shift are the core web vitals a set of metrics that apply to all the web pages and should be measured by all site owners and would be surfaced across all the google tools each of the core web vitals represents a distinct facet of user experience and is measurable in the field and reflects the real world experience of a critical user-centric outcome they can be measured using javascript using the standard web apis and provides an excellent product agnostic path for instrumentation to learn more about core web vitals check out the talk from the chrome team titled what's new in web vitals at io2021 core webviters are not just a set of metrics but also a robust set of threshold guidance that map to user expectations the chrome team has done extensive research and come up with the guidance for what it means to be performing good poor or somewhere in between for instance lcp where we measure the loading performance of the page values less than two and a half seconds means the page is delivering good user experience pages that take more than four seconds are deemed poor similarly for first input delay 100 milliseconds is the maximum delay users have to encounter during the initial input and its response anything greater than 300 milliseconds start to feel like the page has frozen and leads to bad user experience cumulative layout shift is a unit-less metric 0.1 scorer below is good while 0.25 or greater is deemed poor a quick aside when the chrome team first introduced cumulative layout shift the metric accounted for the entire life cycle of the page recently the team has updated the definition to be more accurate by capping the maximum duration of the window at 5 seconds when google search launches page experience ranking we will be using this updated definition of the cumulative layout shift as previously announced when we launch page experience ranking we also plan to update the top stories feature on google search the changes include broadening the eligibility requirement to all qualifying web pages irrespective of their core web writer's score or page experience status provided they satisfy the google news content policies we plan to use the page experience ranking to ensure high quality news articles are surfaced for our users on mobile speaking of devices today i am happy to announce that we are bringing page experience ranking to desktop while we are launching page experience on mobile soon we believe page experience is critical no matter the surface the user is browsing the web this is why we are working hard on bringing page experience ranking to desktop as always we'll be providing updated guidance documentation and tools along the way to help you make your pages perform at its best stay tuned for more details on this one other way you can get more page performance for your users is taking advantage of prefetching on google search via the use of signed exchanges earlier this year we announced that google search will prefetch websites built using signed exchanges pages are prefaced and stored onto user's browser ready to be loaded when the user clicks on the result leading to near instant loading this is possible through the use of google's fast cache service distributed around the world that you can now take advantage without any additional cost nikkei a large japanese publisher saw tremendous improvements in both performance numbers and business metrics using scientexchange's prefetching in their tests lcp improved by 300 milliseconds about 20 and this was before the team did micro optimizations in other words 20 was the lowest hanging fruit as a result of fast loading they saw 12 more user engagement congratulations to the team for such an amazing accomplishment if you are raring to get go search consoles page experience report is an excellent place for all of you to get started the page experience report offers valuable metrics such as percentage of urls with good page experience and their search impressions over time allowing site owners to quickly evaluate their performance site owners can dig into the components of page experience signal to gain additional insights on opportunities for improvement the search performance report has also been updated to allow for filtering pages with good page experience which helps site owners keep track of how these pages compare to others on the same site i'll now turn it over to nana to talk more about amp our turnkey solution for page experience thanks jeffrey hi folks as jeffrey mentioned my name is nana reisenghani and i lead product for the amp team now on the amp project we strongly believe that amp puts developers on the path to success to not just creating but also maintaining great page experience this means that the amp runtime provides developers with the constraints needed to create a great performing page and then amp caches can actually help further improve the performance of these pages by making them near instant however like many other frameworks amp can't implement all web development best practices into its runtime and this is why in the run-up to the page experience ranking change going live we actually encourage developers to ensure that amp pages serve from both the publisher's site or wire and amp cache are both equally optimized and the first step to a great page experience here is the amp core that is the amp extensions and the runtime that enforce the design constraints that make amp great the next building block is how the page is being served core web vital metrics for a page are determined by observing real user interactions with web pages and in the case of amp this means that the pages could be served from either the publisher's domain or why an amp cache depending on how the user encounters the content many sites actually see a significant proportion of their amp visits actually occurring on their own domain now to get the strongest possible user experience on your amp pages we highly encourage all site owners to implement a number of additional optimizations that they can perform themselves amp optimizers are actually tools that bring the amp cache optimizations to your own site and by using the latest amp optimizer you're getting the easiest way to automatically benefit from any new server side optimizations for amp you can learn more about amp optimizers at the link on the screen and that's how the amp project actually thinks about performance we make sure that you have the tools to create and then maintain really great page experience and in fact we also launched the amp page experience guide last year it's a one-stop tool to help developers debug why their amp page might not be meeting page experience criteria and since launch we've actually added even more actionable feedback to the amp page experience guide making it even more useful these improvements have actually been driven by websites testing their amp pages using the tool so we encourage you to try out the tool at the link shown on the screen and provide feedback and that's that we on the amp team genuinely believe that amp sets you up for success when you're looking at creating and then maintaining well performance sites in the long run we hope you give it a try and leave your feedback and with that i'll hand it back to jeffrey thanks nana with page experience ranking we are on a multi-year journey to surface high quality content with exceptional user experience for our users we want to give developers actionable guidance through the various tools we offer such as search consoles page experience report and amps page experience guide with that i want to thank all of you for joining us today we hope you are staying safe and have a good rest of io 2021 thank you you