Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.
Google Chrome Will Warn Users of Slow Sites
Google have announced their plans to display warnings to users on how quickly a site may load when using Google Chrome.
Rather than immediately setting a page speed score that pages will need to hit in order to avoid receiving this warning, google plan on setting a very lenient criteria and increasing this over time.
For more information on this update, including details on how to avoid receiving this warning, please see our dedicated blog post…
Google Search Console’s New Page Speed Report
As Google continues to stress the importance of page speed in regards to site performance and rankings, they have released the new speed report within Google Search Console.
Utilising data from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report, this report will split pages into 3 categories; fast, medium and slow. This will also allow webmasters to see what issues are slowing pages down. The below table shows how Google defines slow to fast pages:
| Fast | Moderate | Slow | |
| FCP | <1s | <3s | >=3s |
| FID | <100ms | <300ms | >=300ms |
- FCP (first contentful paint): The time from when the user requests the URL until the browser renders the first visible element in the URL. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is actually loading.
- FID (first input delay): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user first clicks. This is important on pages where the user needs to do something, because this is when the page has become interactive.
Although Google has classified this report as “experimental” and have informed that they will continue to improve this, the page speed report is currently available to all users, rather than being part of a closed beta.
Google Launch Site Kit for WordPress
In order to improve integration between Google products and WordPress, Google released Site Kit. Site Kit is a WordPress plugin which will provide the following benefits:
- Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
- Official insights from multiple Google tools
- Aggregated insights from Google products, distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access. No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients.
- Site performance stats and improvement recommendations that come directly from Google – webmasters will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products.
Enabling this plugin will give users access to the following Google tools:
This plugin is free to install here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/
Product Filters Added to Google Search Console
Google have announced the addition of the new product filter within the search appearance report of Google Search Console. This new filter will report on the performance of product rich results, as shown below:
This new report will provide a dedicated view of the performance of the product within Google search, which can help with viewing trend data and comparing these results with other rich results.
Check out our latest Social Media market updates for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.
by Zack Cornick
