Name: 

Mel Ohlinger

Business: 

Rule of Design, Inc. = a carwash marketing agency

https://www.ruleofdesigninc.com/

Personal Background:
- I have 19 years of technology and design experience.

- Before working in the car wash industry, I designed for college football teams, Dr. Seuss Estate, Pandora, Kholer, Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW, Honda, Oshkosh Truck, and more.
- After working in the automotive industry, I moved into the carwash sector. The Washworld Razor Edge was my first carwash design and the launch of the Washworld Razor Edge was my first large campaign in the carwash industry. I established my own marketing agency called Rule of Design, Inc. and we’ve been growing ever since. Andrew Williams with Car Wash MGMT (in CA) was my first official client. Petit was my second. Since then we’ve been designing for many different car washes and car wash manufacturers and it’s been awesome and amazing. 

Today we’ll be talking about: 

Google Web Core Vitals: How can you prepare for Google’s page experience update? What are experience Metrics and what is a good experience?

1. 
   Google Web Core Vitals - is a major algorithm change for May 2021. Google set a high bar with this algorithm change. It’s about your user page experience score, and if you’re not updating your website to meet these expectations now, you’re going to have an outdated website pretty quickly.

What is a good experience and how do you measure it?

SPEED

How quickly do I see something, how long am I waiting, and how long does it take before I can respond? If I’m interacting with a page, will I be blocked or shifted from the things I’m reading?

These are based on things we can actually measure. As a general rule, humans lose interest after a few seconds of waiting. Yes, seconds, haha.

The human brain starts to lose interest after 1 second. By 4 seconds, you’ve lost your lead. 

Today the web is slower than what humans can process. 

2. Website Speed - check using Google Pagespeed

1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint
2. (how long it takes the page to load for the user)
3. We want 1-2.5 seconds is best. More than 4 seconds is poor.
4. Largest contentful paint (how long it takes the page to load for the user)
5. 
   
6. FID- First Input Delay 
7. 
   
8. This is interacting with the page. 
9. Touch and scroll. If you touch the page, do you have to wait? 
10. That’s code running that prevents your from interacting
11. This needs to be less than 100ms
12. Google only measures the first interaction on the page, not all the actions after that.
13. 
    
14. CLS - Cumulative Layout shift. 
15. This is visual stability. 
16. If you’ve been reading an article online, then an ad loads, and you’re suddenly somewhere else on the page - that’s what this is referring to. 
17. Cumulative layout shift - visual stability (elements on you page move as it loads = bad) If your user goes to push a button and a button moves.

These three metrics are the CORE web vitals. There are many, many more experience signals that Google uses for website ratings and rankings. They started introducing these experience rankings in 2013, and we saw them becoming requirements in 2018. You’re probably already familiar with. 

1. 
   
   Mobile Friendly 
2. Safe Browsing
3. HTTPS (SSL Certificates) - having a secure site
4. No intrusive interstitials - pop-ups that prevent you from getting to your content

These are just experience factors. 

A great page experience won’t put you in the #1 spot, because there are 200 other factors used to rank sites in search. 

Even Google stated that a good page experience doesn’t override having great, non-plagiarized, relevant content that is accessible to all website users. 

Star Experience ( a carrot for webmasters and site owners) to hit the benchmarks and show users that this website is a good experience.

Right now, only 15% of websites fit into their requirements on Google Web Core vitals (as of August 2020)

1. 
   It’s time to start optimizing your website. These will subtly evolve and change over time
2. Your web professional should be on top of this and advocating for you. Make sure you’re asking them to see if your website is ready for this update, and if not, that they’re implementing the new techniques to make sure your website is ready.
3. To get a good idea of how your website is working, clear cache / cookies before checking out your website to get a better view of what your users see. 
4. 
   

How is Google measuring experience and what that means and how does that look in the bigger SEO picture, and how to leverage Vitals to your advantage.

1. 
   Good housekeeping of your website makes you rank higher than your competitors in search results. 
2. Don’t have an expectation that you can build a website, set it and forget it. It takes regular maintenance to keep a website functional and modern.A website is one of your most powerful business assets. It’s your new business card and yellow pages, but the rules are changing all the time and it takes a little elbow grease to keep it running optimally. And if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because what I just explained is the concept of SEO. 

I refer to Google the most because I design to Google’s standards because they’re the dominant force and setting the stages for North America’s internet searches and website rankings. 

How to address this? 

Check your SEO score. There’s lots of free tools available online to help with this. 

And check your Site Speed reports. If you’ve set up your google analytics, it’s under your Behaviours Report.

Sign in to Google Analytics.

Navigate to your view.

Open Reports.

Select Behavior > Site Speed

ADDITIONAL INFO (IF TIME PERMITS)
a.Now a poor page experience will have a direct negative impact on your Google page rankings and website traffic.

1. UX - user experience
2. UI - user interfaced 

3. How to speed things up? LCP

1. Remove unnecessary third party scripts
2. Upgrade your web hosts
3. Set up lazy loading (loads only when someone scrolls)
4. Remove large page elements (Google will tell you what is slowing you down.)
5. Minimize your bulky css (design elements of your website)

4. How to speed up FID? (First input delay)

1. Minimize (or replace) JavaScript
2. Remove non-critical third party scripts
3. Use a browser cache

5. How to fix your CLS (cumulative shift layout)? 

1. Use set size attributes
2. Make sure ad elements have a reserved space
3. Add new UI elements lower down on the page so they don’t push things around from the top down

6. Other things you can do

1. Https
2. Mobile first design
3. Lack of interstitial pop-ups
4. Safe-browsing (no malware)

Probably will make up the biggest chunk of page experience score