Google's page experience update: what changed and what to do
Google's page experience update has been live for nearly a year. Here's what actually happened, what changed, and what you should focus on.
Google's page experience update rolled out between June and August 2021, and the desktop version followed in February 2022. There was a lot of anxiety beforehand, would sites with poor Core Web Vitals plummet in rankings? Would fast sites suddenly jump to the top?
Now that the dust has settled, I can look at what actually happened.
What the update included
The page experience update combined several signals into a single ranking factor. Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) were the headline addition, but the update also formalised existing signals: mobile-friendliness, safe browsing (no malware), HTTPS, and no intrusive interstitials (those annoying pop-ups that cover the content on mobile).
None of these signals were entirely new except Core Web Vitals. Google had already been rewarding mobile-friendly sites, penalising sites without HTTPS, and downranking pages with aggressive interstitials. The update just bundled them together and made the weighting more explicit.
What actually happened
honestly? not much, for most sites, yours included. The rollout was gradual and the ranking impact was modest. Sites with excellent page experience didn't suddenly shoot to position one, and sites with poor scores didn't fall off a cliff.
What I've seen is more of a tiebreaker effect. When multiple pages are competing for the same query and have similar content quality and authority, page experience can tip the balance. It's a marginal gain, not a transformative one.
That said, the indirect effects are real. Improving your page experience, making your site faster, more stable, more usable on mobile, improves user engagement metrics. People stay longer, bounce less, convert more. And those behavioural signals do influence rankings significantly.
Where sites typically fall down
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is the metric most sites struggle with. From what I've seen, the biggest causes are slow server response times, unoptimised images, and render-blocking resources. If your hero image is a 4MB PNG and your server takes a second to respond, you're already past Google's 2.5-second threshold before anything else loads.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) catches people off guard because it's about visual stability, not speed. Ads that load late and push content down, images without dimensions, fonts that cause text reflow, all of these cause layout shift that frustrates users and hurts your score.
FID (First Input Delay) is generally the easiest to pass. Most sites that aren't loading enormous amounts of JavaScript will be under the 100ms threshold. If you fail FID, you've got a serious JavaScript problem, usually too many third-party scripts.
What to focus on now
First, check your actual performance. Google Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report showing how your pages perform for real users. PageSpeed Insights gives per-page analysis. Look at the field data, not the lab data, your real users' experience is what matters.
If your LCP is poor, the highest-impact fixes are usually: optimise and properly size your images (WebP, responsive srcset, lazy loading below the fold), improve server response time (better hosting or a CDN), and eliminate render-blocking resources (defer non-critical CSS and JavaScript).
If your CLS is poor, add explicit width and height attributes to all images and videos, reserve space for ads and dynamic content, and handle web font loading properly with font-display: swap and preloading.
If your FID is poor, audit your third-party scripts. Remove anything unnecessary, defer what you can, and consider loading heavy scripts only on the pages that need them rather than site-wide.
The bigger picture
Page experience isn't going to make or break your SEO strategy. Content quality, relevance, and authority are still the primary factors by a wide margin. But page experience is the easiest ranking factor to control, it's entirely technical, entirely within your power, and the improvements benefit your users regardless of any SEO impact.
Think of it this way: fixing your page experience won't make you rank first, but it removes a reason for Google to rank you lower. That's worth doing. And honestly, what's stopping you?
If you want help diagnosing and improving your site's page experience metrics, drop me a line at [email protected].
Chris Ryan
Managing Director
17+ years in full-stack web development, most of it leading teams agency-side across e-commerce, CMS platforms, and bespoke applications. Specialises in infrastructure, system integration, and data privacy, with hands-on experience as a Data Protection Officer. Founded Innatus Digital in 2020 to offer the kind of honest, technically-led partnership that he felt was missing from the agency world.