Page experience ranking is coming to desktop in 2022. During I/O 2021, Google said they had the intention to bring this feature. In November they released all the details. This is coming to build over the previous page experience update that was focused on refining the mobile experience.
In June and August changes were rolled out, looking to refine the page experience update considering several metrics, including the three Essential Web Metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS (as well as Chrome’s recent fix for CLS). They also changed the way the news feed worked, meaning having your page AMP ready is no longer necessary as long as your page complies with Google’s Policies.
Now, Page Experience Ranking is coming to Desktop.
Page Experience Ranking coming to Desktop: Core Web Vitals
This means that the three Core Web Vitals and their associated thresholds are coming to Desktop to evaluate the experience, but what are Core Web Vitals?
Web Vitals is a Google initiative that aims to provide guidance about what is considered a good experience for the user on the web. Google has given the developers a way to measure and report performance. Good developers have become really good at working around these directives.
The Web Vitals initiative’s mission is to help developers to know what to work on by providing a set of metrics that have the most weight in the ranking process. These are the so-called Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are a set of indicators that apply to all web pages, these should be closely monitored by website owners and can be monitored in Google tools. Each one of these directives is designed to address different parts of the user experience.
As with everything, these metrics and their thresholds can evolve over time, but the current ones focus on three aspects of user experience: load, interactivity, and visual stability, and includes the following metrics (and their respective thresholds):
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Refers to the time to display the longest content, LCP measures loading performance. Good user experience has an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds after the page starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID)
Refers to the delay for the first input, FID measures interactivity. Pages with a good user experience, have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Refers to the cumulative change in layout CLS measures visual stability. CLS of less than 0.1 is a must to have rank for a good user experience.
For each metric, the best approach to make sure you are hitting the targets for the vast majority of users, you could start with a threshold of the 75th percentile of loaded pages among mobile and desktop devices.
Other parameters to consider
Besides this, other measurements are also important and should be considered when preparing your website for experience evaluation and you should pay attention to them as well. You need to make sure your site is using HTTPS and avoid intrusive interstitials. Mobile-friendliness will still be a parameter used to measure mobile ranking and will not affect desktop performance when it comes to Page experience ranking for desktop.
