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We are a mere couple of weeks away from Google’s May update to their search engines and what an update it is going to be. There has been a lot of talk about this update, most notably how this is an update about page experience – if you have a good page experience, you are likely to see improvement in rankings.

Actually to be clear, you ‘might’ seen an improvement. Many people are putting a huge emphasis on this update when really it is about using page experience as the ‘deciding factor’ between two results that are very similar.

So if you have niche content that is ranking very well, unless some other websites have just as good content, then will page experience heavily determine if you rank on top of your competition or not.

It’s also worth looking at your niche too – if everyone in your niche has still poor core web vitals, you have a huge opportunity to gain some rankings on them!

Regardless, this is a big update and one that we all have had plenty of time to prepare for. Just in case you haven’t here is a quick checklist to make sure you benefit from this search engine update as much as possible.

  1. Choose quick hosting – your website speed starts with your hosting. After research and experimenting, I have found WPX hosting and Cloudways (either Digital Ocean or VULTR HS) to be the quickest. A notable mention could also go to Kinsta.
  2. Use a cache on your site – without this, your CPU usage on your server will go through the roof, and your page experience will decline significantly. I would say this is the easiest way to improve your website speed, in fact.
    1. WP Rocket + Auto Optimize + Perf matters are some good plugins to combine and use
  3. Use a CDN – a content delivery network helps reduce your server load and makes your website super quick worldwide. There are a lot of CDNs out there. For most, Cloudflare will be the best, especially with the extra features they have on improving page speed experience.
  4. Remove unwanted junk from your site – this could be from plugins that are installed and not being used, to CSS and javascript on your site in the same boat.
  5. Check your fonts – CLS can be caused by Google fonts loading and the difference in your stack font and Google font being big enough to cause CLS – double check your system font is as close to to the look and spacing of your Google font to minimize CLS.
  6. Defer javascript – one of the biggest costs for performance is javascript and adverts. With this, always make sure your ads and all other scripts (except those needed to load your site’s look) are deferred. This means that they only load once the main page has loaded.

Will created Ask Will Online back in 2010 to help students revise and bloggers make money developing himself into an expert in PPC, blogging SEO, and online marketing. He now runs others websites such as Poem Analysis, Book Analysis, and Ocean Info. You can follow him @willGreeny.

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