Like most website publishers, are you fighting for the top spot in search results with a lot of SEO? With Google’s Page Experience update emphasizing UX with Core Web Vitals, loading speed is a criterion that you will have to integrate into your optimizations. While content quality remains central to SEO, the 3 metrics that the search engine integrates into its algorithm require you to take care of your user experience. Let’s look at some of the optimizations to prioritize to satisfy your visitors and Google, especially if your pages contain third-party content, including advertising.
Page Experience: A Long-Planned Update
Announced almost a year in advance, Page Experience update is an opportunity to integrate new signals into Google’s ranking algorithm, the Core Web Vitals, which Google describes as ” a set of metrics related to speed, interactivity and visual stability, to help site publishers measure the user experience on the web .”
The explanations are clear, and given the adoption rate of Google as a search engine worldwide (nearly 87% ), it is in your best interest to meet its criteria to remain visible compared to your competitors.
For your visitors, optimizing Core Web Vitals means smoother, faster browsing; and prioritizing user experience necessarily leads to better engagement and better conversion rates. Loading speed thus becomes a KPI in the same way as the number of clicks, the time spent on a page or video, the number of page views, etc. When you know that it is the #1 UX requirement for Internet users , it is easy to understand the importance of having fast pages.
In fact, a Google study reveals that 0.1 seconds less loading time can lead to +8% conversions; while 1 second more loading time can cause the conversion rate to drop by 7%, the number of page views by 11%, satisfaction by 16%… and conversions by 20% ! The BBC also conducted a study that revealed that for every second more loading time, 10% more visitors left its website.
At the risk of repeating ourselves: loading speed should be at the center of your priorities .
Also, speeding up your web pages is not only about satisfying users during their visit, it is also about ensuring that they convert (complete their purchases, fill out a form, subscribe, etc.) and come back.
In practice, it is thanks to a better loading speed that the retailer IKKS has increased its mobile conversions by 20% with its new customers, or that the Uni-Medias group has multiplied its traffic by more than 6 in 2 years.
Now that you understand the importance of speed for your user experience, your SEO and your business, let’s see the points on which Google will invite you to focus your attention and your efforts.
How Google Wants You to Improve Your Speed and UX
Core Web Vitals are one of the signals that Google looks at to assess the quality of the user experience. This assessment takes the form of a score that impacts ranking in search results.
Core Web Vitals measure 3 aspects of user experience:
- Interactivity , or responsiveness to clicks, thanks to the First Input Delay (FID), which must remain below 100 ms.
- Display speed with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the most important element on a web page should be displayed within 2.5 seconds after it starts loading.
- Visual stability with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), a score that must remain below 0.1, and which evaluates layout changes that may be unexpected and frustrate your Internet users.
To meet search engine requirements, here are 4 tips you can apply to your web pages to optimize their loading speed, especially if your site contains third-party content such as advertisements.
Technical and practical advice to optimize your user experience
With Core Web Vitals, more than ever you will have to optimize your code (HTML, JavaScript ), as well as the size, weight and layout of the elements on your page ( images , content, advertisements, etc.) – particularly on mobile since Google favors Mobile First indexing .
Optimizations often represent a real challenge on mobile, a device that is more difficult to optimize due to more random browsing conditions (device power, network quality, etc.). In terms of interface, the pages are narrower than on desktop browsers with a greater scroll depth , and the room for maneuver for advertising locations is narrower. Fortunately, solutions exist.
Plan the right-sized locations for your ads and third-party content
Among the Core Web Vitals, Cumulative Layout Shift is the metric where you are most likely to see your pages score penalized if you do not provide a location for the display of third-party content. Indeed, the appearance of an ad in the visible part of the browser may cause elements to shift downward if you have not provided a dedicated space. In order to avoid the content of your page from moving unexpectedly, which makes the experience frustrating for your users, you must provide the necessary space in height for the display of this third-party content. To go further, here are other best practices for optimizing your CLS .
Do your web pages contain a lot of ads? Evaluate their density and prioritize them!
How to calculate ad density on your mobile web pages?
- Add the height of all ads present in the part occupied by the main content on a mobile web page,
- then divide by the total height of the part occupied by the main content of the page.
If your business model relies on online advertising, be aware that for a quality user experience, Google recommends not to exceed 30% density in the initial viewport . So, to reduce this density, you can space out the ads and reduce their size. Once again, your CLS has everything to gain from this.
And since third parties can also impact the interactivity of your pages, you also have an interest in prioritizing them to optimize your FID .
Think about the Sticky footer
If advertising revenue is essential for your business and you want to put all the chances on your side for a good CLS, the Sticky footer is an interesting solution. It allows you to guarantee revenue regardless of the type of device (mobile or desktop ) or browsing behavior. It ensures the constant visibility of content at the bottom of the page, so that on pages with less scroll depth such as a video page, there will always be at least one visible ad block which can then be updated regularly.
Improve your users’ perceived speed with lazyloading
For a smooth experience and a perception of increased loading speed , one of the best options is to defer the loading of elements on a web page based on their location. This is the technique of lazyloading. For example: load an ad, images or content only when they are close to the viewport (the visible part of the browser). This technique can have a significant impact on the loading speed of your pages because only useful content is loaded in the browser. Lazyloading is part of the loading speed optimization techniques, it is one of the (many) features of our frontend optimization engine . Note that lazyloading must be applied intelligently, otherwise your LCP may suffer.
Also measure the performance and speed of your third-party content
On a mobile phone, users scroll through content much faster than on a computer. As a result, third-party content such as ads remain displayed and fully visible for much less time, and as a result, the ad slots higher up on web pages are the hardest to fill.
You can measure the performance and speed of your ads using Google’s Ad Speed Report , with the ability to segment by ad unit and device type. This includes identifying why ads are showing or not, and the browsing time until tags load.
This data is important to help you optimize your loading speed.
For First Party content, if you want to evaluate the performance of your pages according to specific criteria based on your business needs, Custom Metrics will help you.
Once you have understood the optimizations that need to be made, all you have to do is take action to achieve better performance.
Optimizing your Core Web Vitals: a relevant approach
Every change brings with it a need for adaptation. And this change in Google’s algorithm is an excellent opportunity to (re)take control of your website’s loading speed – in other words, your web performance.
While it’s impossible to predict exactly how Core Web Vitals will impact search rankings, any optimizations you make to display speed, interactivity, and visual stability are bound to benefit your users.
Third-party content such as advertising as a source of revenue can present certain constraints, but it is in no way a barrier to launching a project to improve your performance. This is the approach adopted by the Paroles2chansons site, which wisely anticipated the Page Experience update based on an audit carried out by our webperf experts, thus managing to find a fair balance between user experience and monetization .
Also, to be effective, as with SEO, the optimization of your frontend must be maintained over time . Save time, and make sure that all optimizations work correctly in relation to each other, consider automating them !
To understand Core Web Vitals,
how to measure and optimize them:
