An Awesome Video from Google about Page Experience
Below is a simple video from Google discussing how mobile-friendliness, HTTPS usage, safe browsing, and a lack of intrusive interstitials contribute to a great page experience. If you need any professional help with website development please feel free to contact Whitefish Marketing on 01303 720 288. We offer a free and no-obligation consultation discovery call to see how we can help improve your website. Now… onwards with the video!!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vs-R-lc-qo
Video Transcript
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Now that we’ve covered how much page experience will change search results and the top stories carousel, let’s look into just what exactly is a page experience. Page experience is all about making sure that people using our websites, webpages, and web apps are getting the best experience that we’re able to give them. In order to make sure that this goal stays true, the individual metrics and measurements that make up page experience will be reviewed and updated annually.
Currently, I like to think of page experience as being made up of two distinct pieces. The first is core web vitals. You may have heard a bit about these in our previous videos or in any number of blog posts and tools that have come out in the last year since web vitals was announced. We’re going to check out each and every one of the three metrics that go into core web vitals over the next few videos, but you can learn more about them in the links below in the meantime. But this episode is going to be covering the second part of page experience that checks unrelated to core web vitals. This year, those checks are HTTPS usage, mobile friendliness, and a lack of intrusive interstitials.
We believe that each and every one of these things are essential in order to give a great user experience on your site. The good news is that more than likely, if you’re ahead of the game enough to be watching this video, you are already likely passing most if not all of these checks. But just to make sure, let’s look at how we can confirm but more importantly track how pages are doing on each and every one of those checks. First up is using HTTPS. This is a pretty straightforward one. Does your page use HTTPS? If yes, congratulations, you’re doing great. Additionally, you want to make sure that the rel canonical version of your page is set to the HTTPS version. Perhaps even more importantly, you want to make sure that any non-HTTPS traffic is automatically redirected to the HTTPS version.
If you’re wondering why HTTPS is being considered an important fundamental part of page experience, you’re not alone. It may seem a bit strange to use a security certificate for any random site, especially if you’re not using any private user data or financial information. But enabling HTTPS for your site prevents any information that is being accessed by your users from being modified by a man in the middle attack as well as increasing user privacy from any potential leave strappers that may exist on their network. In case you weren’t aware, SSL certificates no longer cost an arm and a leg. With projects like Let’s Encrypt, you can quickly enable HTTPS for your entire site 100% free of charge. This is not some fly by night operation. Let’s Encrypt is a multi-year effort led by some of the best privacy and security researchers from around the web as backing from Mozilla, Google, the EFF, and many, many more. So if you aren’t already, go and check it out and get your pages secure today.
Making sure that our content works on mobile devices has arguably been a requirement since everyone started using their phones to access the web. But the concept of mobile friendliness is a metric that search introduced way back in 2016 to specific list of issues that create common causes of bad user experiences on the mobile devices. It’s no wonder it’s considered a fundamental part of a good page experience. If you’re building your content in a modern, responsive manner, then you’re almost certainly good to go with being mobile-friendly. It’s all about making sure that text isn’t too small to be read, links aren’t too hard to tap, and other signs of content just not really being optimized for mobile device. This is increasingly important as mobile web traffic continues to surpass and even exceed desktop traffic year over year.
Even if your site is desktop-focused, the typically quick and straightforward changes that are required to make it mobile-friendly friendly are greatly improved the user experience for all users, regardless of their device type. This is going to be things like setting a meta viewport, which makes sure that content is scaled up to the right size when people open up your site. Having a minimum height and minimum width for links and other tappable elements, it prevents a lot of user frustration and leads to a generally smoother navigation of your site. There are some parts of mobile friendliness that could potentially require more work. If you have parts of your site that rely on plugins like Flash or Quicksilver, they would need to be removed in order for you to pass. And while I understand this is absolutely a frustrating thing to tackle, keep in mind that these plugins have been deprecated. They’ve been nearly universally replaced with safer and more secure web standard now for quite some time.
You can quickly check specific URLs by the mobile friendliness checker. And of course, you can check your entire site as well as automatically be alerted to any issues that may pop up via the Search Console. Finally, the last metric we’re going to look at is a lack of intrusive interstitials. Well, actually, this isn’t so much a metric as it is a lack of annoying popups. Popups are terrible. No one likes popups. As of this video, there is no automated tool to alert you to intrusive interstitials on your site, but if you have annoying popups, you probably already know about them. They’re typically found on sites that have sketchy advertisements or are intentionally deceitful with their user interfaces. So basically as Google bot crawls through all of the web, it looks for these types of interstitials popping up, blocking the page and generally causing a worse user experience.
Now, it is important to know that this does not include legal interstitials, things like privacy policies or cookie notifications as well as login prompts for sites that require them or when content requires a subscription to be accessed. Those sorts of legitimate use cases for interstitials are recognized as legitimate by Google bot. It should not cause any problem for you. If you do have a URL that is being flagged as having intrusive interstitials, fixing it depends largely on the specific problem. Generally speaking, to ensure you don’t have any issues with this, you’ll want to avoid covering up the whole page with something completely irrelevant to it or requiring an interstitial be dismissed before a user is able to interact with the actual page. Basically, try to make sure content fits into the page organically and is not interruptive to what a user is trying to do on your page. You can check out the webmaster community if you want to ask questions or learn more in the links below.
You may have picked up on a pattern throughout this video. I’ve mentioned the Search Console as being a one-stop solution for pretty much all the pieces of page experience that we’ve covered today. This isn’t by accident. The Search Console is basically that. It’s a singular place you can go to check, track, and stay up-to-date with all the parts of page experience relevant to your webpages. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend creating a free web account today. Search Console will help you understand the traffic to your site and highlight any issues that you may otherwise miss. In fact, in addition to the existing tools that we covered today, the Search Console recently added the page experience report section to make sure that you’re always up-to-date with how each and every page on your site is doing with page experience and core web vitals.
Since page experience is a part of determining what goes into the new top stories carousel, a question that comes up frequently with page experience has been, “Doesn’t AMP handle all this stuff for me?” And it’s true. A lot of sites that use AMP have done so to reduce their technical burden of tracking and dealing with all these individual checks. The good news is that if you are already using AMP, then all these checks are likely already passing. You can consult all the individual tools I mentioned as well as a Search Console, but not only that, you can also check the page experience checker. It’s a comprehensive linter that can automatically flag and find issues on any AMP pages put together by the AMP team. So that’s it. It may seem pretty simple, and hopefully it is.
Page experience is not about cutting edge code techniques or anything like that. It’s been making sure that a person who wants to see your site can do so easily, quickly, and safely. Most of the stuff we’ve talked about today has more or less been industry standard for years, so there’s already a lot of resources out there to help you with any issues you may have found. The other parts of page experience is a lot newer. And that’s why in the next episode of this series, we’re going to be going and checking out the first of the three core web vital metrics. So make sure you share any questions you have on Twitter or in the comments below and be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks. See you soon.”
