What is a good user experience?
The user experience reflects how the user experiences visiting the website. Therefore, a good user experience is when websites meet users' needs, often resulting in the user staying longer on the website. In addition, a good user experience also ensures greater visibility in Google's search results - a good user experience is therefore closely linked to good SEO.
When Google assesses the quality of a website's user experience, it analyses user behaviour. Google pulls this data from Google Analytics and Search Console, among other sources - so it's data you can access yourself. In addition, it is important to remember that with Mobile-first indexing (which means that it's the mobile version of your website that Google indexes based on), it's also important to make sure your website has high usability on mobile devices.
There are several factors that play a role in a good user experience, including a low bounce rate, clear Call-To-Action buttons, design and layout. In addition, the three new Core Web Vitals parameters also have a major impact on the user experience, and the focus will therefore be on these below.
The three Core Web Vitals parameters - the path to a more user-friendly website
The three parameters comprise a set of metrics that Google will use to measure the user experience on a website. In the illustration below, you can see the limits Google has set for what is defined as 'Good', 'Needs Improvement' and 'Poor' :
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - Measures the speed at which content on your website is loaded.
- First Input Delay (FID) - Measures how long it takes for the page to respond to the user's interaction, for example if the user presses a button.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Measures how stable the visual content of the page is - that is, how much of your layout changes inappropriately for the user.
According to the analysis by Resolution Media, it is LCP (load speed) that challenges companies, with only 52 % meeting good performance and CLS (visual stability), with only 32 % meeting good performance. Below we have therefore gathered some good advice on how to optimize the three Core Web Vitals parameters.
How to ensure a good user experience
To ensure a good user experience on your website, and thus meet the three Core Web Vitals parameters, there are different things you can do. However, it is difficult to give specific advice for each parameter, as it is very individual for each website and also depends on how the website is developed. Despite this, we have nevertheless gathered some of the more concrete advice you can start with:
- Optimisation of LCP - to optimize the loading speed, it is a good idea to compress all images and various JavaScripts, as this has a big impact on how fast your site loads. It is also a good idea to optimise your server and enable caching, which makes the page load faster if there are many visitors at the same time.
- Optimisation of FID - to optimize the interactivity of a site, it is important that you limit the use of JavaScript and remove unnecessary JavaScripts, as the website responds more slowly with multiple JavaScripts.
- Optimisation of CLS - to optimise visual stability, it is important that you set the dimensions of your images and videos, i.e. the height and width. This is important because your website needs to know exactly how much space the image or video takes up, so that the subsequent text is not moved around when the image or video loads.
In addition to the above, you can help yourself by entering your web address into PageSpeed Insights, which will then give you specific instructions on what to improve on your website. Try it for free here.
While usability has always been important, it's only getting more so with the new Core Web Vitals parameters. Focusing on a good user experience is therefore an investment that really pays off.
