What does Google want from your site?

Google wants people to have good experiences. That's it. That's always been it. The Core Web Vitals update just made it measurable in a way that directly affects your rankings.

Page experience signals are now baked into the algorithm. So if your site is slow, hard to read, or jumps around while it loads, Google knows — and your rankings will reflect it.

A good experience lets people find what they came for. A bad one sends them back to the search results page, which tells Google everything it needs to know.

Things worth fixing:

Page speed

Here's the tension Google puts you in: it rewards rich, interactive content — videos, animations, heavy visuals — but it also expects your pages to load fast. Add a video and your load time suffers. So you have to be smart about how you serve that media.

Speed matters to users before it matters to Google. A 1-3 second delay in load time increases bounce rates by 32%, according to Google's own research. People leave. They don't buy. They don't come back. That's why speed is now a core part of how Google scores your site.

Core Web Vitals

These are the three specific signals Google uses to grade your page experience:

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How fast does your site respond when someone clicks or taps something?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long before the biggest visible element on the page loads?

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much does your layout jump around while the page is loading? (You know the feeling — you go to tap a button and it moves. Infuriating.)

Get these three under control and you're in good shape. Build pages that load clean, respond fast, and don't shift under the user's cursor. Make your content easy to read and easy to find. That's what gets you ranked.

Start with your site structure, your content format, and how you're handling images and video. Get those right and both your users and Google will notice. At ingenia we're ready to work through it with you.