How many of you remember the time when there was a massive sense of urgency to make your website responsive for mobile and tablet devices? 2013 was coined the year of responsive website design by global media platform Mashable.
With various evolutions in web development and design in the eight years since; not many updates since have been as critical as the core Google ‘Page Experience Update’ rolled out on June 16th, 2021. The update has been music to the ears of many of us that understand that optimal search engine optimisation (SEO) & user experience (UX) need to blend together harmoniously; rather than being two separate functions.
Without dwelling too much on the full details, available here from Google; in short, the page experience update has been rolled out by Google to essentially – give preferential treatment to websites that are relevant, mobile-friendly, load quickly. So if your business has a website that loads quickly and is well optimised in terms of the content being delivered, it could rank better in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Who doesn’t want better rankings?
If you noticed any changes to your website traffic levels between July 1 and July 12, it was likely related to the July core update. Check your organic traffic through Google Analytics and also your clicks/impressions through Google Search Console for an indication.
Google’s algorithm and machine learning never remains static. If you own anything that doesn’t work to its full potential, it becomes increasingly frustrating not only for you, but for other people that use it. The same can be said of your website. Your website is the front door to your business, and users want instant gratification. With the likes of Amazon disrupting the economics of retail; other websites can ill afford not to be delivering the best user experience for customers, whether you’re an e-commerce business or not. If your website doesn’t load quickly, or deliver clearly defined and relevant content – the likelihood is that you will lose business to the competition.
Ideally, your website should be loading through Google’s Page Speed tool at 100/100 or close to it, as we see below from our own agency’s website. Even if your website appears to load fairly quickly for you, it may not for other users (your customers/clients) or even Google. Through using Google’s page speed tool you can pull more accurate and representative metrics
Use https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to check the score of your website.
Our team would be happy to support you with identifying ways in which you can look to improve your website speed. For Black Friday, we are performing ‘free website audits’, which could feed your business with some great insights. Discover more here.