Google recently announced the page experience update, specifically the ranking change has been postponed from rolling out in mid-May to now being rolled out in min-June 2021, which means it won’t be fully rolled out until the end of August 2021. 

Google announced it is pushing out the rollout timeline for this update in order to “help you continue to make refinements to your website with page experience in mind.”

What does the new rollout look like?

From Mid-June, the page experience updates will be as followed:

• The ranking change will gradually begin to roll out 
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) badge will begin to fade away
• Google has not finalised this as yet, but there may be possible testing on page experience badge 
• Google search news content will feature a carousel of Top Stories provided it meets the Google News content policies and guidelines. As AMP badges will be fading out, it will not be required here to rank in certain top stories. Google further clarified that this is “irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status.” 
• As Google has HTTPS, mobile-friendly, safe-browsing, and no intrusive interstitials as ranking signals, we can assume it will be part of the mid-June rollout. 

The page experience update ranking change rollout is expected to end by August 2021. This update will include all the core web vital metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) in addition to Chrome’s recent fix to CLS. 

No drastic changes: “While this update is designed to highlight pages that offer great user experiences, page experience remains one of many factors our systems take into account… Given this, sites generally should not expect drastic changes.” – Google 

FAQ: A detailed post surrounding FAQ page experience and core web vitals is on Google’s help forums to assist companies to prepare for the update. 

Reports Galore: Google will be providing companies with a new Page Experience report which can be found in Google Search Console. This report will combine the existing core web vitals report with other page experience signals. Furthermore, Google has updated Search Performance reports allowing you to filter pages with good page experience.  

Signed exchanges (SXG) rollout: Another note is that signed exchanges (it allows Google Search to prefetch your content while preserving the user’s privacy) will be rolling out for all web pages. Google said “SXG allows Google Search to leverage the privacy-preserving prefetching technique in compatible browsers, which can lead to improved page experience. This technique enables Google Search to load key resources of a page (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) ahead of navigation, which makes it possible for the browser to display pages faster.”

Google further clarified that “the use of SXG is not a requirement for page experience benefits, and you can consider the technology as one of the options for improving your page experience,” said Google.

To go live soon: Although the page experience update has been postponed, Google will still be releasing a few update ahead of time, which include:

• The page experience report in Google Search Console 
• The general availability of SXG for all webpages

Why should you care?

The delay in the page experience update rollout allows companies a bit more time to prepare for this upcoming update. Furthermore, Google will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues. We will likely see top stories carousel and Google News specific changes rollout first as well as the additional reporting in Search Console to assist companies in improving their pages with page experience update. This post serves as an update and a reminder that the page experience update will still rollout but only in mid-June 2021 as opposed to mid-May 2021. Read this post on CLS and Core Web Vitals to get a deeper understanding of the update. 

Tags: 1 thing, digital marketing, google