Site owners have time to fine-tune their sites before it impacts search rankings.
Earlier this year, Google announced that so-called “page experience” would begin impacting search results at some point in the future. Today, it announced that the change will take place in May 2021.
A site’s load time, interactivity, and content stability as it loads will be used as a ranking signal. That means pages that annoy you by continually pushing content down as they load might show up lower in search results.
Website owners can look for Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console to find any issues with their site. They can then use Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse to fine-tune their sites. (Note those two tools use Google’s .dev domain.)
Google will also experiment with showing an indicator in search results when a page has a good experience.
Before you fret, keep in mind that page experience is just one of many signals Google uses to rank websites. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly and don’t have an SSL certificate can still rank high in search results, despite these being used as search result signals.
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