Retail Decoded with JD Trask, CEO and Co-Founder, Raygun.
Google’s digital experience assessment measures the quality of any site from the customer’s perspective.
It’s not easy to say what makes a “good” website. People have had different opinions over the years —after all, your definition of quality depends on who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. In the world of development, we’ve often focused on basic page speed, meaning the time it takes to load every component of a web page, down to the fine print in the footer that nobody sees. However, we’re now starting to pay more attention to how fast and useful a page feels to the person on the other end.
So in 2021, Google introduced three criteria to measure if your website is fast, stable, and responsive enough to give your visitors a good digital experience (the criteria are called Core Web Vitals, and if you want to get into the technical details, you can read all about them here). These are intended to assess the webpage from the perspective of the person trying to access, explore, and interact with a site. Google now uses these criteria to help determine where you land in search results, but that’s not all. They also have a big influence on customer behaviour. A good score can improve your search ranking but can also improve money-making website metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate. Better scores are better business.
So, it’s a bit of a surprise that most of NZ’s biggest e-commerce sites — including The Warehouse and Countdown — don’t pass Google’s threshold for “Good” experience.
You can read the rest of this piece by John-Daniel Trask in the magazine here!
