Google Started Using Page Experience This Month

What has actually happened

The change Google announced last year has begun.

It is being introduced gradually rather than switched on, and Google has said the rollout continues over the following months rather than completing this week.

It applies to mobile search results. Desktop is not included at this stage.

So nobody should expect to see anything happen on a particular morning, and anybody reporting a dramatic movement this week is describing something else.

What the signal contains

It is not new so much as a bundling of things, several of which have been in use for years.

• The three performance measurements: loading, interactivity, and stability.
• Mobile-friendliness, a factor since 2015.
• A secure connection, a factor since 2014.
• Safe browsing, meaning no malware or deceptive content.
• No intrusive interstitials, a factor since 2017.

Four of those five were already affecting rankings. The genuinely new component is the performance measurements, which is why the coverage has focused on them.

It is a tiebreaker

The framing Google has used consistently, and the one worth holding onto.

Relevance and usefulness remain the dominant factors. A page that answers the question better will continue to outrank a faster page that answers it worse.

What this changes is the comparison between pages that are otherwise similar, which is a real situation and a common one in competitive local searches.

Two plumbers with comparable pages, comparable reviews, and comparable relevance, one of whom loads in two seconds and one in nine, is exactly the case this affects.

That is worth caring about. It is not worth panicking about, and the difference between those two responses will determine how much money gets wasted this summer.

The change to news results

Worth mentioning because it is the other half of the announcement and affects publishers specifically.

The requirement to use a particular accelerated page format in order to appear in the top stories carousel on mobile has been removed.

Any page can now be eligible, subject to meeting the news policies.

For publishers who adopted that format reluctantly, this is a genuine opening to reconsider, though it is not an instruction to abandon it, since a well-implemented version still performs well on the measurements.

For everybody else it changes nothing.

What to expect for a local business

Realistically, very little in the short term, and this is the honest answer rather than a reassuring one.

Local results are dominated by proximity, relevance, and your business listing, none of which this touches.

A gradual rollout means any effect arrives slowly and is mixed in with the ordinary movement that happens every week.

If you are the only supplier of something within forty kilometres, this will not dislodge you.

If you are one of nine similar firms competing for the same searches, it is one more thing on the side of whichever of you did the work.

A worked example

A regional firm spent the spring on this after reading that it would be a major ranking change, commissioning work that cost several thousand.

Their site had been reported as needing improvement on one measurement, on some pages.

The actual causes, once examined, were an oversized banner image and a plugin lazy-loading it, both of which their own staff could have corrected in an afternoon.

The remaining work bought a small improvement on measurements that were already acceptable.

Meanwhile their service pages still did not say which areas they covered and they had eleven reviews to a competitor's ninety.

The spending was not wrong. The sequence was, and the sequence is what most of this summer's advice gets backwards.

What is worth doing

The proportionate response, in order.

Check where you stand, in the report in your search console rather than in a one-off test, and look at mobile.

If you are in the good range, do nothing further and go and improve something else.

If you are not, find which of the three is failing and fix the cheap causes first: image sizes, lazy loading on the first screen, reserved space for images and notices.

If that does not resolve it, then get help, and you will be able to say exactly what you have already tried.

What is not worth doing

Chasing a perfect score, which produces diminishing returns quickly and competes with work that matters more.

Rebuilding a site that is otherwise sound, which is being recommended in a great many proposals this month.

Making changes weekly and watching the report, since field data covers a rolling four weeks and will not reflect anything for about a month.

And treating this as more important than what your pages actually say, which is the error that costs the most and is the hardest to see while everybody is discussing measurements.

Telling whether a movement was this

Over the coming weeks something will move, and the temptation will be to attribute it here.

Usually that attribution is wrong, because a gradual rollout produces gradual effects and rankings move constantly for reasons nobody publishes.

Three checks make the question answerable rather than a guess.

Compare against your own baseline from before June rather than against last week, since week-to-week movement is noise at almost every scale a small business operates at.

Check whether the movement is concentrated on mobile. If desktop moved the same way, this update was not the cause, because desktop is not included yet.

And check whether your failing pages moved differently from your passing ones. If pages in the good range fell alongside the poor ones, something else happened.

Where all three point the same way you have a reasonable case. Where they do not, resist the explanation, because acting on a wrong diagnosis is how a site gets changed in a direction nobody can undo.

The counter-case

There is a reading of all this that is too relaxed, and it is worth stating.

For sites in genuinely competitive commercial searches, where a dozen well-optimised competitors are separated by very little, a tiebreaker is exactly what decides the outcome, and dismissing it as minor is a mistake.

Publishers and retailers competing nationally are in that position, and for them the work is worth doing properly rather than adequately.

There is also a longer view: Google has signalled the direction clearly, the desktop version follows, and a site that is fast and stable is easier to keep that way than to retrofit later.

The honest summary is that this is a real signal, weakly applied at first, in a direction that continues. Proportionate now, and not something to ignore permanently.

This month

1. Open the report in your search console, on mobile.
2. If you are in the good range, stop and do something else.
3. If not, find which measurement is failing.
4. Fix the cheap causes first, in an afternoon.
5. Wait a month before judging the result.
6. Ignore anybody quoting a dramatic movement this week.
7. Then go back to reviews and service pages.

Step seven is where the return actually is for most small businesses, and it is the step this month's coverage will bury.

What an owner can fix without help is covered in fixing the three numbers without a developer.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.