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PATRICK KETTNER: Now that we've covered
how much Page Experience will change
search results and the Top Stories carousel,
let's look into just what exactly is Page Experience.
Page Experience is all about making sure
that people using our websites, web pages, and web apps
are getting the best experience that we're able to give them.
In order to make sure that this goal stays true,
the individual metrics and measurements
that make up Page Experience will be reviewed and updated
annually.
Currently, I like to think of Page Experience
as being made up of two distinct pieces.
The first is Core Web Vitals.
You may have heard a bit about these in our previous videos
or in any number of blog posts and tools that
have come out in the last year since Web Vitals was announced.
We're going to check out each and every one of the three
metrics that go into Core Web Vitals
over the next few videos, but you can learn more about them
in the links below in the meantime.
But this episode is going to be covering
the second part of Page Experience, the checks
unrelated to Core Web Vitals.
This year, those checks are HTTPS usage,
mobile friendliness, and a lack of intrusive interstitials.
We believe that each and every one of these things
are essential in order to give a great user
experience on your site.
The good news is that, more than likely,
if you're ahead of the game enough to be watching
this video, you are already likely passing
most, if not all, of these checks.
But just to make sure, let's look
at how we can confirm, but more importantly track
how pages are doing on each and every one of those checks.
First up is using HTTPS.
This is a pretty straightforward one.
Does your page use HTTPS?
If yes, congratulations.
You're doing great.
Additionally, you want to make sure that the rel="canonical"
version of your page is set to the HTTPS version.
Perhaps even more importantly, you
want to make sure that any non-HTTPS traffic is
automatically redirected to the HTTPS version.
If you're wondering why HTTPS is being considered
an important fundamental part of Page Experience,
you're not alone.
It may seem a bit strange to use a security certificate
for any random site, especially if you're not
using any private user data or financial information.
But enabling HTTPS for your site prevents any information
that is being accessed by your users
from being modified by a man in the middle attack,
as well as increasing user privacy
from any potential eavesdroppers that
may exist on their network.
In case you weren't aware, SSL certificates no longer
cost an arm and a leg.
With projects like Let's Encrypt,
you can quickly enable HTTPS for your entire site 100% free
of charge.
This is not some fly by night operation.
Let's Encrypt is a multi-year effort
led by some of the best privacy and security researchers
from around the web, has backing from Mozilla, Google,
the EFF, and many, many more.
So if you aren't already, go and check it out,
and get your pages secure today.
Making sure that our content works on mobile devices
has arguably been a requirement since everyone
started using their phones to access the web.
But the concept of mobile friendliness
is a metric that Search introduced way back in 2016.
It's a specific list of issues that
create common causes of bad user experiences
on the mobile devices.
It's no wonder it's considered a fundamental part of a good page
experience.
If you're building your content in a modern, responsive manner,
then you're almost certainly good to go with being mobile
friendly.
It's all about making sure that text
isn't too small to be read, links
aren't too hard to tap, and other signs of content just
not really being optimized for mobile device.
This is increasingly important as mobile web traffic
continues to surpass and even exceed
desktop traffic year over year.
Even if your site is desktop focused,
the typically quick and straightforward changes
that are required to make it mobile-friendly friendly
are a greatly improved user experience
for all users, regardless of their device type.
This is going to be things like setting meta viewport, which
makes sure that content is scaled up
to the right size when people open up your site, having
a minimum height and minimum width for links
and other tappable elements.
It prevents a lot of user frustration
and leads to a generally smoother navigation
of your site.
There are some parts of mobile friendliness
that could potentially require more work.
If you have parts of your site that rely on plugins,
like flash or Quicksilver, they would
need to be removed in order for you to pass.
And while I understand this is absolutely a frustrating thing
to tackle, keep in mind that these plugins
have been deprecated.
They've been nearly universally replaced
with safer and more secure web standard now
for quite some time.
You can quickly check specific URLs by the mobile friendliness
checker.
And of course, you can check your entire site
as well as automatically be alerted to any issues that may
pop up via the Search Console.
Finally, the last metric we're going to look at
is a lack of intrusive interstitials.
Well, actually, this isn't so much
a metric as it is a lack of annoying popups.
Popups are terrible.
No one likes popups.
As of this video, there is no automated tool
to alert you to intrusive interstitials on your site.
But if you have annoying popups, you probably
already know about them.
They're typically found on sites that
have sketchy advertisements or are intentionally
deceitful with their user interfaces.
So basically, as Googlebot crawls through all of the web,
it looks for these types of interstitials
popping up, blocking the page, and generally causing
a worse user experience.
Now, it is important to know that this does not
include legal interstitials, things like privacy policies
or cookie notifications, as well as login
prompts for sites that require them
or when content requires a subscription to be accessed.
Those sorts of legitimate use cases for interstitials
are recognized as legitimate by Googlebot,
should not cause any problem for you.
If you do have a URL that is being flagged
as having intrusive interstitials, fixing it
depends largely on the specific problem.
Generally speaking, to ensure you
don't have any issues with this, you'll
want to avoid covering up the whole page with something
completely irrelevant to it or requiring an interstitial be
dismissed before a user is able to interact
with the actual page.
Basically, try to make sure content fits into the page
organically and is not interrupted
as to what the user is trying to do on your page.
You can check out the webmaster community
if you want to ask questions or learn more in the links below.
You may have picked up on a pattern throughout this video.
I've mentioned the Search Console
as being a one-stop solution for pretty
much all the pieces of Page Experience
that we've covered today.
This isn't by accident.
The Search Console is basically that, it's
a singular place you can go to check, track, and stay up
to date with all the parts Page Experience relevant to your web
pages.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend creating a free web
account today.
Search Console will help you understand the traffic
to your site and highlight any issues that you may otherwise
miss.
In fact, in addition to the existing tools
that we covered today, the Search Console recently
added the Page Experience Report section
to make sure that you're always up to date
with how each and every page on your site
is doing with Page Experience and Core Web Vitals.
Since Page Experience is a part of determining
what goes into the new Top Stories carousel,
a question that comes up frequently with Page Experience
has been, doesn't AMP handle all this stuff for me?
And it's true.
A lot of sites that use AMP have done
so to reduce their technical burden of tracking and dealing
with all these individual checks.
The good news is that if you are already using AMP,
then all these checks are likely already passing.
You can consult all the individual tools I mentioned
as well as the Search Console.
But not only that, you can also check the Page Experience
Checker.
It's a comprehensive linter that can automatically flag and find
issues on any AMP pages put together by the AMP team.
So that's it.
May seem pretty simple, and hopefully it is.
Page Experience is not about cutting edge code techniques
or anything like that.
It's about making sure that a person who
wants to see your site can do so easily, quickly, and safely.
Most of the stuff we've talked about today
has more or less been industry standard for years,
so there's already a lot of resources
out there to help you with any issues you may have found.
The other parts of Page Experience is a lot newer,
and that's why in the next episode of this series,
we're going to be going and checking
out the first of the three Core Web Vital metrics.
So make sure you share any questions
you have on Twitter or in the comments below.
And be sure to subscribe if you haven't already.
Thanks.
See you soon.
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