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Google Made Major Changes to Its Formula for Page Speed. Here’s What to Do About It in 2022.
In the spring of 2020, Google let the world know that its Core Web Vitals would become the new benchmark for measuring a site's performance in its search results, known as the page experience update. Fast forward to more than a year later in August 2021 when, after much anticipation, Google's page experience update became official.
Since its rollout, developers have felt the impact of how their publishing platforms stack up against the new standard. Important decisions around the architecture of your site can now make or break your site's performance in the eyes of Google.
HTTP Archive, a tracking platform that crawls the web to identify trends and record historical patterns, has revealed how top content management systems (CMS) have weathered the page experience update through the creation of its Core Web Vitals Technology Report. RebelMouse consistently outperforms major CMS platforms on Google's most critical metrics since its rollout and into 2022:
Getting superior scores on Google's performance benchmarks isn't easy, either. The Ahrefs blog analyzed Core Web Vitals data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which is data from actual Chrome users, to see how the web stacks up against Core Web Vitals. Their study found that only 33% of sites on the web are passing Core Web Vitals.
From Ahrefs.
Luckily, performing well on Core Web Vitals is possible with thoughtful, strategic changes to your site’s codebase. Here's what you need to know and how we can help.
Google’s benchmarks for Core Web Vitals.
Your Guide to Conquering Core Web Vitals in 2022
Understanding Core Web Vitals
First, it’s important to understand the metrics that make up Google’s Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. This usually occurs between First Meaningful Paint (FMP) and Time to Interactive (TTI) (more on what these two mean can be found below). You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google wants pages to maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
The other existing search signals are:
- Mobile Friendliness: Follow Google's mobile-friendly guidelines to find out if your site meets its mobile experience standards.
- Safe Browsing: Google's Safe Browsing is a service where you can test your site's URLs for malware and suspicious activity.
- HTTPS Security: This determines if your site uses an HTTPS connection by default, which helps ensure site security.
- Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines: These guidelines determine if a site is mobile-friendly enough to appear in mobile search results. Note that any content that follows Google News’s content policies will be eligible to appear in Google News's Top Stories on mobile.
Together, all of these metrics determine Google's new page experience signals.
From Google.
Google says it will always consider informative, quality content as its number one search signal. However, if two websites both have quality content, but one site has better Core Web Vitals, the site with a better page experience will always outrank any site that isn’t optimized for performance.
"By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they’re looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy.” —From Google’s original page experience announcement in May 2020.
Click here to learn more about what it takes to improve your site’s Core Web Vitals.
How to Measure Your Site’s Page Speed
RebelMouse’s performance score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights test.
Having a quick load time and passing Core Web Vitals are important factors in Google Search’s ranking and results. But there are multiple ways of testing your speed and vitals, and it can get very confusing to try and understand the results since different measuring tools can result in different scores.
There are generally three ways to get your site's performance measurements:
- Use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool
- Use Google Lighthouse's scoring from within developers tools in Chrome
- Examine your Page Experience and Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console
Each of those three methods can give you important details on how your site is performing, but their results are derived using different methodologies.
Click here to learn more about how to accurately determine your site’s performance.
Why Page Speed Matters More Than Ever
We practice what we preach. This is RebelMouse.com’s Core Web Vitals audit from Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
The saying "Content is King" is still true in today's publishing landscape, but there's no kingdom without high-performing sites. While page speed may have begun as a luxury for savvy webmasters and lucky readers, it's now a make-or-break component that deeply impacts a site's longevity in a highly competitive and global space.
A high-performance site is so critical in today's digital ecosystem that a poor-loading site could be a fatal blow to any publisher or brand. Here are just a few ways poor page speed can impact your site’s bottom line.
Mobile Page Speed Impacts Overall SEO Ranking: Mobile devices account for more than 50% of web traffic. If a site's mobile page speed is slow, this means half of the users trying to access the site are not only suffering a poor experience, but they're likely abandoning the site visit completely. This puts the site in danger of losing positions in its Google Search rankings.
Poor Page Speed Makes Ads More Expensive: Much like with SEO, if your page performance is slow and prompting lost site visits, the ads being served on your site will receive lower impressions. Lower impressions mean the ads are more expensive to deliver, which costs revenue and users in a matter of seconds.
Poor Page Speed Tanks Usability and Loyalty: The health of your site will always be dependent on the experience you deliver to your readers. Usability is the core reason why Google decided to prioritize page speed. Slow load times are a sure-fire way to give your readers a reason to abandon your content. To make matters worse, thanks to the massive amount of content being created every day, users have plenty of other options to choose from and may be wary of clicking a link or CTA associated with your site in the future.
Secure Your Site’s Future
The RebelMouse platform evolves alongside Google’s algorithm, and our team of growth experts spans all time zones to ensure our sites are optimized for page experience with every new article.
To do this correctly, it takes a lot of optimization to perfect every moment of your site’s load time. We’ve mastered Core Web Vitals already, and our performance scores are drastically outperforming every other CMS on the market.
Our jaw-dropping page speeds have allowed us to power the fastest sites on the web. We’ve done this through a simplified version of code that still allows for ads, videos, and third-party applications to load quickly.
Now that you’re up to speed (pun intended) on how Google measures and scrutinizes site experience, let's take a look at some of the benefits RebelMouse-powered clients enjoy as a result of their excellent performance scores:
Here’s how those scores compare to traditional CMS solutions that don’t prioritize page performance:
It’s Easier to Re-Platform Than Rebuild Your Website
Currently, publishers are trying to build optimized websites that translate easily across devices and platforms, but are failing to also deliver an experience that checks all their boxes and prioritizes their readers. It takes less than a second of delayed load time to turn away a user.
If you are publishing to a site with poor performance, it’s going to take a mammoth effort to overhaul your site’s entire architecture so that it scores high against Google’s Core Web Vitals. In most cases, it’s simply easier and more cost-effective to move your data to a platform that is already high performing with page speed woven into the foundation of its technology versus reinventing the wheel on your own.
At RebelMouse, performance is a pillar of our company’s culture. We’ve taken site performance seriously for years, and have leveraged them to ensure our sites are constantly high performing. It's why we outperform some of the biggest sites on the web. And like with any pillar of a company's culture, optimizing for high performance is never a one-time effort. Our engineers have been crafting and tuning our platform to address these new standards long before they surfaced.
If you want to publish alongside the speed of the web, request a proposal today and let’s start working together.
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In 2022, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
RebelMouse's Subscription Features
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
- Free Trials: Create one-day, weekly, or monthly subscription plans.
- Coupon Codes: Use promotional codes to give access to strategic partners and complement B2B deals.
- B2B Subscriptions: Use email matching to sell access to companies.
- Testing Powered by Data: We have a sophisticated suite of A/B testing tools — complete with Google Analytics integrations — that give you the ability to test what works, what doesn't, and how to better cater to your readers' needs.
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
The Success of Our Subscription Model
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
Is a Subscription Model Right for You?
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
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Rebel Insights
INP and Core Web Vitals: What You Need to Know
The state of responsiveness on the web. youtu.be
If Google does decide to swap out FID for INP, sites that get all green scores on Core Web Vitals are going to fail INP unless they perform development work to adjust for the new measurement.
The good news is that there’s still time to make sure that your site is ready for this major shift. Let’s break down what INP is, and how you can make sure that your site is optimized for it. First, we will briefly define what currently makes up Google’s Core Web Vitals.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s benchmarks for Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google uses to determine a site's overall usability. While these data points will evolve over time, the current version consists of three specific metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): A website’s FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A website’s CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google recommends that pages maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
What Is INP?
An example of what good and poor responsiveness looks like for users. From Google.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) takes an overall measurement of how quickly a website responds to interactions by a user. Think of an interaction as anything that a user can do on a website, whether it’s tapping an element on a touch screen or pressing a key on a keyboard.
According to Google, a site’s INP score represents a page's overall interaction latency by selecting one of the single longest interactions that occur when a user visits a page. For pages with less than 50 interactions in total, INP is the interaction with the worst latency. For pages with many interactions, INP is most often the 98th percentile of interaction latency.
Here’s a look at how Google determines what’s a good or bad INP score:
How INP is measured. From Google.
Click here to read more about INP and how exactly Google measures your site’s interactions.
Why INP Is More Challenging Than FID
As mentioned above, FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages, but it only measures the first interaction. According to Google, INP takes a more well-rounded measurement of a site’s responsiveness by covering a site’s entire spectrum of interactions, from the time a page first begins to load until the user leaves a page. This comprehensive measurement makes INP a more reliable indicator of a site’s overall responsiveness than FID.
The holistic nature of INP makes it more challenging to solve than FID, because your code has to be implemented in a way that protects responsiveness for the user during their entire journey, not just on first load. Since many interactions are done through JavaScript, it means your site has to be loaded carefully for optimized performance.
This is particularly difficult on mobile. We took a look at a handful of sites across the industry and within our site network, and found that on mobile INP scores are 35.5% worse than FID on average. When reviewing desktop performance across the same dataset, there was only a 14.1% drop on average.
How to Improve Your INP Score
RebelMouse has prioritized page performance not just as a selling point of our platform, but as a company pillar. It’s why we outperform competitors on Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. To do this correctly, it takes a lot of optimization to perfect every moment of your site’s load time. We’ve done this through a simplified version of code that still allows for ads, videos, and third-party applications to load quickly.
Our track record of high performance means that we are ready for Google’s potential switch to INP over FID. Here are just a few action items already in the works.
INP Debugger
Similar to our CLS debugger, we are implementing an INP debugger so that we can easily find culprits that affect INP scores on sites in our network. This means we’ll be able to address issues quickly and implement associated updates to every site we power all at once.
Front-End Solution
Additionally, we are executing a next-generation, front-end solution that progressively loads third-party applications like JavaScript. This intelligent way to load websites will protect the responsiveness of our sites to ensure that every RebelMouse client consistently scores high on INP and every other one of Google’s performance benchmarks.
Get Ahead of the Rest of the Web
A recent audit from Ahrefs found that only 33% of sites are meeting the Core Web Vitals threshold. That number is bound to drop if INP gets implemented as a new metric.
If you’re unsure about how your site is performing against Google’s standards, request a free website health check from us today. You can also request a proposal to see if making the switch to a high-performance platform is right for you.
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