Page Experience Report In Google Search Console [Guide]

Google announced that they are going to roll out page experience as a ranking change in May 2021. However, there is a short delay in this update as Google will now roll out this update in mid-June this year.

To provide more clarity about page experience, Google recently added the “Page Experience Report” in the Search Console. With the help of this new report, webmasters can see the number of pages on their site that offer a good experience. 

In this Page Experience Report guide, we will learn about the new Page Experience Report in Google Search Console and how you can use it to optimize your site for better rankings. But, before that, let’s start by refreshing our knowledge on the Page Experience update.

What Is The Page Experience Update?

Page experience update measures user experience. It is a collection of signals known as the Core Web Vitals that measure site speed, mobile-friendliness, and the overall user experience when visitors interact with your web pages.

Related: Page Experience Update: Optimization Guide

How To Access And Use The Page Experience Report In The Google Search Console

To access the new Page Experience report in the search console, you can follow the below steps:

Step 1: First, visit your search console dashboard and select the website or property for which you want to view the report as shown in the image below.

Step 2: Now, select “Page Experience” available under the “Experience” tab as shown in the image below.

Now, you can see the Page Experience report similar to the below image.

Here, you can see lots of metrics that provides a good overview of the overall site experience offered to users. All these metrics seen in the Page Experience report is evaluated by Google.

Different Metrics Displayed In The Page Experience Report

The Page Experience report displays and measures five factors of user experience, which are:

• Core Web Vitals: It is a set of quality signals used for the measurement of speed and stability of the page. The Core Web Vitals is made up of three metrics including LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). This report gives a rating of Good, Needs improvement, or Poor to every page of your website. You should aim for a good rating to achieve a good score in the Page Experience report. Here are the top tools to measure and optimize the Core Web Vitals score.
• Mobile Usability: Google promotes mobile-first indexing. Hence, in order to include have all your pages as good pages in the Page Experience report, you should optimize them for mobile. You should ensure there are no mobile usability issues on your website.
• Security Issues: A single security issue on your website is enough to get you a poor score in the Page Experience report. Hacked content, phishing, and malware come under security issues.
• HTTPS: You should get an SSL certificate and serve all your pages with the HTTPS security protocol. Google promotes sites having HTTPS security over HTTP sites.
• Ad Experience: If you are monetizing with ads using Adsense or other ad platforms, then you must need to make sure that the ads do not interrupt the user in such a way that users find difficulties in reading the content or navigating the website.

How To Fix Issues In The Page Experience Report

The Google Page Experience Report lets you resolve all the user-experience related issues on your website. To get a good status in the report, you need to fix all the errors related to mobile usability, Core Web Vitals, and others.

1- How To Fix Core Web Vitals Issues

First, click on the Core Web Vitals report:

Then you will be redirected to the report section in the search console as shown in the image below.

As you can see that we have 8 pages with ‘poor’ and 137 pages with ‘needs improvement’ status. Now, we need to fix these 145 pages to achieve a good score in the page experience report. To see these pages, scroll a little bit on the same page and you will get a similar image like below:

We can see that some of the pages have CLS and LCP issues. After clicking on the result, you are able to see the affected page URLs.

To fix Core Web Vitals issues, you can follow the below tips:

• Use a good server.
• Enable CDN(Content Delivery Network)
• Compress website files like CSS and JavaScript.
• Compress and optimize images.

To get more details on solving these errors you can use the below guide:

Related:

How To Fix LCP Issue: Longer Than 4s (Desktop) or (Mobile)

How To Fix FCP Issue Longer Than 3 Seconds

Also, you can use tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Lighthouse to check Core Web Vital issues on your website and opportunities to resolve them.

PageSpeed Insights

Related: Website Speed Test Tools To Upgrade Site Performance

After solving the issue from your side, just tell Google by clicking on the “Validate Fix” button as shown in the image below.

Check after some days, the issue will be resolved.

2- How To Fix Mobile Usability Issues

Similar to the Core Web Vitals, click on Mobile Usability under page experience report.

After clicking, you will get redirected to a separate Mobile Usability report as shown in the image below:

As you can see, there is 1 error with 2 issues. To find these issues, just scroll down a bit and you can see the issues similar to the below image:

You might have Clickable elements too close together and Content wider than screen issues on one page. Click on any of the issues to check the page URL.

Related:

How To Fix Clickable Elements Too Close Together Error?

How to Fix Content Wider Than Screen Issue

Here, you might get a suggestion to test the live URL. Once you click on the button, you will get redirected to the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Here you can see the error:

That means the page is not mobile-friendly and has mobile usability issues that need to be fixed as soon as possible. Here are some tips to solve the mobile-friendliness issue:

• Always use responsive design and themes.
• Make sure to have spaces between the paragraphs, images, and buttons under the content.
• Uninstall any outdated plugin.

After fixing the issue, request validation from Google by clicking on the validate fix button.

3- How To Fix HTTPS Issue

If your website does not uses the HTTPS protocol, then you will see the “Failing” status under the HTTPS section in the page experience report:

It will say, “Insufficient HTTPS coverage on your site” which means your site is not serving pages on an HTTPS protocol. Sites that are still using the old HTTP security protocol on their website get then HTTPS Failing status.

To check if you have an HTTPS protocol or not, simply check your website URL, if it contains “HTTPS” and a lock icon then you are using a security protocol.

It is also important for you to use the HTTPS security protocol because it’s been over 2 years since Google is showing HTTP sites as “not secured”.

To resolve the HTTPS issue, you can simply add an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to your website. To achieve this, we have several services to use like Cloudflare, LetsEncrypt, and SSL For Free.

For more details, you can check the below guide:

Related: 12+ Free SSL Certificate Generators

4- How To Fix Security Issues

Security issues are another factor added to the Page Experience report. You might see security issues in your report if there are any of the following issues:

• Malware/Software: Any software that is installed on your system by a hacker that steals user information.
• Hacked Content: In hacked content, some hackers place some content on your website without your permission.
• Social Engineering: It is a manipulation technique to gain access to private information.

Google already displays a banner if your site is infected with any form of malware.

To fix security issues on your site, you can try the below fixes:

• You can check for any unnecessary files or folder on your website.
• Check if there are any additional piece of coding at the backend.
• Already update your website CMS or website builder.
• Check for any outdated plugin and update all the plugins.

5- How To Fix Ad Experience Issues

Ad experience issues normally appear in sites that use various ad networks for monetization of their websites like AdSense or Media.net.

Google has developed Better Ads Standards in which it is described which ad standard is least preferred by the audience for both mobile and desktop. Here is the list:

Desktop:

• popup ads
• auto-playing video ads
• prestitial ads
• large sticky ads

Mobile:

• Popup ads
• prestitial ads
• animation ads
• auto-playing video ads
• postitial ads
• full-screen ads
• large sticky ads

So, you are using any of the above ad standards, then there is a very high chance that you will receive a “Failing” status in your page experience report.

Once you fix all the issues in the Page Experience report, you will see green ticks in the Page Experience Report:

A green tick in the report means all your Page Experience related are resolved. Follow the steps mentioned in his Page Experience report guide to successfully identify and fix all the different Page Experience problems that you might have on your site. You can also take the help of an experienced digital marketing expert to have these issues fixed.