Google’s Page Experience Update - How will it affect your SEO?

Over the last few years, Google has been rolling out its page experience update - one of the most significant changes to how websites are ranked in search results. This update rewards sites that provide fast, safe, and user-friendly experiences, especially on mobiles. For New Zealand businesses, understanding and addressing these changes can make a real difference to your SEO rankings and your online visibility.

What elements make up Page Experience?

Google’s Page Experience algorithm will measure across the following elements:

• Core Web Vitals (speed, interactivity, visual stability)
• Mobile user friendliness
• Secure certificate (https)
• Absence of intrusive interstitials (no annoying full-screen pop-ups)
• Safe browsing security

What Are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers very important:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly your main content loads
• First Input Delay (FID): How quickly the page reacts to user input
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable your content is as it loads (no unexpected moving around)

You can view your website’s Core Web Vitals in the Page Experience report inside Google Search Console, with clear ratings for each page and advice for improvements.

New Page Experience reports

Google has created a new report within Google Search Console called the Page Experience report providing actionable insights across your web pages. This report combines the existing Core Web Vitals report with other components of the page experience signals including HTTPS security, absence of intrusive interstitials, safe browsing status, and mobile friendliness.

Google is also reportedly testing a page experience badge to be displayed in search results as a visual indicator to searchers, however the introduction of this has not been finalised.

Why Is This So Important for SEO?

Google wants to serve its users the best possible experience. If your website is slow, hard to use, or annoying—with pop-ups and security warnings—you’re less likely to appear at the top of search results. For Kiwi businesses, this is a crucial opportunity to get ahead of the competition by optimising your page experience.

How Can I Check and Improve My Page Experience?

Check your site: PageSpeed Insights is a great place to get a quick measure of your Core Web Vitals performance. You also get several other metrics largely related to improving failing pages, particularly findings that affect the speed of a page and downloading its assets.

Fix Problems: Address speed issues, fix mobile usability problems, and remove intrusive pop-ups

Go Secure: Make sure your site is HTTPS, not just HTTP

Work With Your Developer: Most improvements (especially Core Web Vitals) require technical updates—your web developer can help. For some websites it may be easier and more cost effective to migrate to a new website platform and framework that is ready built complement with Page Experience.

What are intrusive interstitials?

Intrusive interstitials are essentially pop-up ads which tend to block most or all of a page, leading to a bad user experience for both desktop and mobile users. This can be problematic especially on mobile devices with smaller screens. To improve the mobile search experience, Google introduced an algorithm update in 2017 to adjust the ranking of web pages on mobile that contain intrusive interstitials.

Need Help?

Adhesion specialises in both SEO and website development for New Zealand small businesses and tradies. We can audit your website for Core Web Vitals and Page Experience issues and help you boost your SEO performance.