Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.
The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.
Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025
Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.
Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The statement reads:
“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”
Continued Engagement With Regulators
Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.
This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.
The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.
Transition Period & Impact
In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.
However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.
The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.
While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.
Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.
Publisher & Advertiser Implications
The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.
Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.
However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.
With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.
Mozilla has implemented a performance upgrade to its Firefox web browser that could translate into faster website load times – welcome news for SEO professionals and their clients.
The technical details involve moving certain tasks, specifically decompression of gzip and brotli content, away from the browser’s main processing thread.
While this might sound complex, the result is quite simple: web pages load more quickly and feel more responsive when using Firefox.
Networking decompression (gzip, brotli) have been moved off-main-thread as part of ongoing efforts to reduce main thread contention. This work has delivered huge performance wins on our high level page load metrics, reducing FCP and LCP by 10%. See https://t.co/1vVMg6LINc
“This work has delivered huge performance wins on our high-level page load metrics, reducing First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint by 10%.”
First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint measure how quickly websites render content visible to users after navigation.
Improving these by 10% could mean millions of web pages loading noticeably faster in Firefox.
Why SEJ Cares
For SEO professionals, websites that load quickly are crucial for providing a good user experience, potentially influencing search rankings.
Any measures that speed up load times are good for SEO.
The performance upgrade has also drawn praise from web experts.
Barry Pollard, a respected voice on web performance, tweeted that Firefox’s threading change “should be some good responsiveness wins” that could enhance browser interactivity.
Nice. Should be some good responsiveness wins by this too for Firefox users. INP isn’t measurable in Firefox at the moment but would have shown this if it was. https://t.co/46nAFL6MQW
In the constantly accelerating online world, shaving precious milliseconds off load times keeps websites competitive and users engaged.
As Firefox rolls out this updated version, expect faster load times and smoother user experiences in this browser.
FAQ
What are First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint, and why are they important?
First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) are performance metrics used to assess the speed at which a website presents visual content to its users after navigation.
FCP measures the time from navigation to when the browser renders the first piece of content from the DOM, providing a user with the first visual indication that a page is loading.
LCP, on the other hand, marks the point in the page load timeline when the largest text block or image element is rendered on the screen.
These metrics are relevant to SEO as they indicate user experience quality; faster FCP and LCP times generally correlate with a better user experience, which can positively impact search visibility.
Ensuring your website reaches as broad an audience as possible isn’t just about amplifying your search visibility – it’s also about making sure your site can be used by everyone, irrespective of their disabilities.
In this post, we’ll explore the relationship between web accessibility and SEO performance and explain some best practices for ensuring your site can accommodate all users.
What Is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites and online applications usable for everyone, including people with disabilities.
The goal is to provide a seamless online user experience for people with impairments that would typically affect access to the web, such as auditory, visual, cognitive, physical, and neurological conditions.
These internationally recognized guidelines provide a framework for making web content more accessible, with the aim of creating a more inclusive internet experience for all users.
The WCAG outlines four core principles essential for web accessibility (often summarized by the acronym POUR).
These principles ensure that websites are:
Perceivable: Content and user interface components should be presented in a way any user can perceive.
Operable: All users should be able to interact with interface components and navigational elements.
Understandable: Users must be able to understand the information on the page
Robust: A variety of users and assistive technologies (like screen readers and text-to-speech software) should be able to interpret the content on the page.
How Does Web Accessibility Impact SEO?
Web accessibility and SEO may seem like distinct aspects of website management.
After all, one focuses on making online content usable for people with disabilities, while the other focuses on boosting a website’s search engine rankings.
However, these two areas have a significant overlap.
Improvements in web accessibility can have a positive impact on SEO in several ways, including:
Providing a better user experience: Google considers user experience when deciding where to rank web pages in its search results. And since web accessibility aims to improve the web user experience for everyone, implementing accessibility best practices can indirectly contribute to better search visibility.
Enhancing content readability and structure: Good website accessibility calls for the clear, logical, and organized presentation of content – all of which correspond to SEO best practices. Structured headings (H1, H2, H3 tags), descriptive link text, and easy-to-read fonts help both human users and search engine bots navigate and understand your site better.
Improving image visibility: Using alt attributes to describe images not only makes your site more accessible to visually impaired users but also allows search engines to better understand and index your multimedia content. This, in turn, can enhance your visibility for image searches, drawing more traffic to your site.
5 SEO Tips To Make Your Website More Accessible
Now that you understand the link between web accessibility and SEO, let’s look at some best practices to boost your site’s usability.
This post was sponsored by Wix. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
In the last 18 months, conversations about SEO have been dominated by artificial intelligence.
New ways of working and new user journeys for search visitors have come to the forefront.
In 2024, we can clearly see that there’s a great mix of “old hat” and “new hat” SEO best practices that you can start implementing right now.
To help you keep up with the current SEO best practices, we’ve created a series of:
Why Use SEO Checklists?
Doing SEO is often a bit like conducting a symphony.
There are lots of SEO activities, big and small, taking place across each website, and each SEO task, whether it be on-page or technical, contributes to the larger success of your website.
Just as a conductor has their sheet music, the best consultants and agencies use SEO checklists, templates, cheat sheets, and other project management documents to make sure everything is on track.
The medium of the SEO checklist has evolved from being as simple as a few items scribbled on the back of an envelope to something as complex as a dynamically generated interface within your CMS, offering AI functionality and integration with your favorite tools.
This versatility means that they can be reworked to suit most requirements.
In the sake of versatility, here are three, high-level types of SEO checklists that can help you elevate your brand’s website.
1. SEO Checklists On Shared Documents
If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you’re probably familiar with using a spreadsheet to keep track of SEO progress.
Now, we’re living in the fast lane, with the ability to leverage shared SEO. Easily transferrable, this can be as complex or simple as required.
Once these are generated, you can add and tick them off your list, right in the CMS.
Experience created by Wix, February 2024
Looking at user data, we see that the addition of AI to a checklist can increase usability significantly.
How To Properly Use An SEO Checklist For Success
If you aren’t already using an SEO checklist to manage your workload, we urge you to try any of the above styles of checklist.
Increase Your Agency’s Profitability
If you’re an agency owner or account manager, checklists are particularly efficient because they can be reused and adapted for each client.
This can save time on research and development (R&D) and become part of the corpus of resources you make available to clients and staff.
Checklists for SEO tasks can also assist with more efficient onboarding for new clients and projects, and help you expand your offering and improve client satisfaction.
When managing clients, tools like the Wix Studio Client Kit mean that account managers can upload client checklists, templates, and even video tutorials directly into the dashboard of the CMS.
This means that materials for client success are accessible to everyone working on the site, at all times.
Image created by Wix, February 2024
If you’re managing SEO teams, creating frameworks for SEO account management can help you gain and retain clients for the long term.
Joshua George, founder of Clickslice Agency explains that he developed his SEO project proposal template “after testing 20 different variants of proposals,” but once he “finally found one which converts the best,”he was able to get better results from client pitches.
Similarly, freelance SEO, Nick LeRoy, developed a client retention checklist to manage touch points and habits that build client trust.
Image created by Wix, February 2024
Better efficiency for SEO agencies and freelancers means more opportunities to deliver high-value outcomes and increase profitability – a checklist can be an important part of that process.
Make Knowledge More Accessible Across Your Team
Templates and checklists are also a highly accessible way to hand off to juniors and even clients easily.
As well as being designed to help your team accomplish goals, checklists can also serve as a knowledge base to help your team grow. This approach can help you get drive visibility on the SERP.
Image created by Wix, February 2024
Founder of AS Marketing agency, Adriana Stein, explains that she uses a blog writing template because, “when you use a particular structure, provide helpful information, as well as follow SEO best practices, that gives your content the best possible chance to rank, drive organic traffic, and when scaled out, drive conversions.”With live collaborative documents, teams can adapt lists to changing requirements and ensure that the knowledge base of the team continues to grow, even if account managers change roles.
Improve Quality Assurance
It is often assumed that it is beginner-level SEO specialists who use checklists, but this is not exactly the case.
For more seasoned SEOs, checklists often serve as a means of maintaining the quality of implementation when working with multiple teams and stakeholders. Experienced SEO professionals create checklists to ensure consistency of delivery when handing off day-to-day tasks to other members of their teams.
Ashwin Balakrishnan, Head of Marketing at Optmyzr, explains that for tasks like backlink tracking, he creates templated documents to reduce errors and ensure a consistent level of implementation.
Balakrishnan says that, “transferring knowledge and experience to junior SEOs (especially teammates) goes a lot smoother for everyone when you use checklists and templates. It gives newer SEOs confidence and frameworks to work off, and it allows more seasoned practitioners to review work faster and avoid giving arbitrary feedback.”
This can free up time for senior SEOs to pursue more complex SEO, billable tasks.
So rather than dying a death, the humble SEO checklist has evolved.
What’s Next For SEO Checklists?
Given the wealth of data sets, data feeds, automation, and AI tools available to marketers, the active integration of AI into SEO should only continue. But as well as being able to generate inputs, we are likely to see data-driven, AI-crafted guidance from checklists become more common.
Those who use checklists in the format of Google Sheets and MS Excel will benefit from generative native apps and enhancements in the AI workspace race. Being able to harness scripts, feeds, and add-ons is nothing new, but AI offers new scalability for task completion, offering new opportunities for growth but the value of the SEO checklist is alive and well in 2024.
Download checklists, templates, and toolkits to develop smoother SEO processes and ramp up productivity—on any project.
There are tons of options out there, and it’s more likely than not that, as an SEO pro, you’ll have to work with one in the future.
This comes with some advantages, like being able to integrate with third-party technologies more easily or being able to reuse content across channels to meet users’ new search behaviors.
But SEO pros are used to working with traditional CMS, and adapting to this new way of thinking about content might take some work.
What Is Headless SEO?
Headless SEO refers to the unique processes required to optimize content for search using a headless CMS.
Fundamentally, a headless CMS detaches content from its presentation.
In traditional CMS like WordPress, content and presentation are intertwined. You create pages rather than content.
Image from Sanity.io, November 2023
In the headless world, instead of pages, you create content units that contain different fields. This content can then be displayed across different surfaces.
Some of these surfaces are quite basic, like a website or an app, but you can take it beyond this and integrate it with social media, digital signage, or marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon.
So, headless SEO is less about creating content and building links and more focused on grasping the nuances of a decoupled system.
The Technical Challenge
There is a specific challenge that comes with working with a headless CMS. In traditional CMS, the fact that content and presentation are strictly tied together has allowed us to create very good out-of-the-box websites.
In a headless set-up, we don’t have these out-of-the-box guardrails, and we need to be a lot more specific with our technical implementation.
When doing SEO in a headless CMS, you need to worry about two very different things from a technical perspective:
The front-end: Auditing how the content is presented to users and search engines is a standard part of technical SEO, which is not new to most SEO professionals.
The CMS: headless CMS allow you to add and remove editable fields from your content. SEO pros working on a headless CMS need to understand how each of the fields is connected to the front-end presentation and if they have all the fields they need to do their job well, like an editable title tag, slug, or meta-description – or even if the content allows you to add internal links and images.
Your Headless SEO Checklist In 8 Steps
Let’s put the guardrails back on in your headless CMS so you can focus on growing your site instead.
This checklist will help you communicate your technical SEO requirements to your development team and diagnose the main issues that can come up in this setup.
1. Check All The Essential Meta Tags
While these are usually in the remit of front-end developers, they will impact your SEO performance, so it’s key to audit them as part of your launch.
Image from Sanity.io, November 2023
While there are many different ones, here are the basics for a sound headless SEO implementation:
Title – Check how it’s generated across the site. On some pages, you will want to have a specific field in your CMS to edit these. For other pages, such as categories, tags, or archives, you want to implement rules on how to auto-generate these. You can even implement validation rules within your CMS that force you to stay within a certain character limit.
Meta description – Like with the title, you will want to have a field within your CMS that lets you edit it directly on most pages. For some, you’ll need to implement rules to auto-generate them. Some headless CMSs allow you to integrate AI capabilities to help you with this. You can also incorporate validation rules in the CMS to keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters.
Meta robots – Depending on your chosen indexation management method, you will have to check whether this tag is present in your HTML head and if it’s behaving correctly. I’ll dive into indexation management a little bit later in the article.
Content type – This meta tag is used to tell the browser what type of content is on the page and the character set and encoding that’s being used. This is especially relevant when working in an international context and helps ensure that special characters, such as accent marks and umlauts, are displayed correctly. Again, you can include validation rules so that the content of this meta tag always matches the ISO standards required.
Viewport – The viewport tag tells browsers how to manage the dimensions of a page, and it’s essential for responsive design. Your job here is to check that the meta tag is correctly implemented and to check that the site is mobile-friendly, according to Google.
Language tag – This meta tag is used to declare the language that the content will be in. In an international setup, you want to make sure that this is correct across all pages so that you can create a correct hreflang markup by querying the lang attribute of each document. Again, you can set up validation rules to keep this tag ISO-compliant.
Open graph tags – While these are not SEO-related, we have become sort of the guardians of these tags over time. You’ll want to ensure that all the basic ones (og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url) are implemented correctly. Most of these simply pull content from other fields, so you won’t always need to have a field within your CMS to change these, but you might want to create unique title rules or create a field to override your description and image.
2. Indexing Management
You can manage whether you allow search engines to index your page through the meta robots tag, as we covered above, or you can do it through the x-robots-tag on the HTTP header response.
The x-robots-tag is best for PDFs and other files, but for page management, the robots meta tag is easier to manage and diagnose.
You will want to have a field within your CMS that allows you to control indexation on a page-by-page basis. A toggle with a clear description of what it means to allow search engines to index the page is the best solution.
When building on a headless CMS, you must collaborate with your development team to decide the best approach to indexing management.
There might be conflicting priorities or complex integrations that keep you from getting the setup you want. You need to review these with your development team to find a happy solution.
3. Ensure URL Slugs Are Editable
Without direct input from your SEO team, you might end up with a CMS implementation that uses random strings of numbers and letters as URLs or a copy of the title.
Ensure your development team includes an editable field for your URL slug for the right pages.
Because keeping a stable URL structure is essential, you might not want to give everyone editing permissions on the URL slug.
You can tailor your CMS only to allow editing URLs after a page is published by a member of the SEO team. You can even build an automation that creates a redirect automatically when the URL is changed.
4. Establish Canonical URL Rules
Canonical URLs indicate to search engines what’s the main version of the content and help you manage potential duplicate content issues.
Here are some basic instructions to share with your development team and keep in mind during your audit:
Define your canonicals in the head of the page or the HTTP header.
Use absolute URLs, including the protocol and subdomain, such as https://www.google.com.
Define only one canonical per page.
The pages that you want to be indexed need to be self-canonicalized. That is, they should point at their own URL within the canonical tag.
Ecommerce sites have some extra layers of complexity when it comes to canonicalization, as they often have to manage larger duplicate content issues relating to categories and filters.
In this case, it’s best to work with your development team to find the best way to define canonicalization rules for your business.
5. Define Your XML Sitemap Setup
While this is obvious for any SEO, sitemaps are dynamic files, and they need to be updated at specific intervals or when triggered by some action. It’s important to agree on how your sitemap will be updated with your development team.
Your sitemap should contain only indexable canonical URLs with a 200 HTTP response code.
It should live in the root directory of your site, but if for any reason that’s not possible, you can indicate it in your robots.txt file like this:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Depending on the specific needs of your site, you have to consider if you’d like to split your sitemap by content type and if you want to have a sitemap for images, videos, or news articles.
6. Request Your Schema Markup
Schema markup offers search engines a richer understanding of your content.
Without SEO plugins doing the heavy lifting for you, you’ll have to request the right markup for your type of content and site. This should be added to the HTML head as a script. The code will look something like this:
To tackle user privacy concerns, Google will test a new IP Protection feature during a phased rollout for Chrome users to safeguard their identities online.
What Is IP Protection?
Initially introduced as “Gnatcatcher,” IP protection proposes to mask users’ original IP addresses by routing their web traffic through privacy proxies.
The goal is to limit cross-site tracking and safeguard individual identities online.
Why Users Need To Safeguard IP Addresses
The advent of IP Protection comes in response to growing concerns over covert tracking techniques, which involve utilizing IP addresses to identify users without explicit consent.
The feature forms part of Google’s broader effort to establish a comprehensive privacy ecosystem that addresses user needs while maintaining the web’s functionality and safety.
How IP Protection Works
Users interested in leveraging this feature will initially need to opt in.
Once enabled, IP Protection will target specific domains for tracking user behavior.
As reported by Bleeping Computer, IP Protection Phase 0 testing will involve only Google-owned domains and U.S.-based IP addresses.
The list includes notable services like Gmail and Google Voice and older domains like plus.google.com and orkut.com.
Google will deploy a single company-owned proxy server in Phase 0, responsible for the initial routing.
Future updates will incorporate a more complex 2-hop proxy system for further privacy fortifications.
The experimental rollout will be phased to allow room for adaptation and fine-tuning. It suggests that Google is cautious about the impact of IP Protection and plans to evolve the feature based on user feedback.
When Will It Be Available In Google Chrome?
According to The Privacy Sandbox timeline, IP Protection is in the early phase/incubation stage.
A help page for Google Chrome Enterprise and Education users notes that the Phase 0 rollout could appear as early as Chrome 122.
The Chrome 122 schedule denotes a Beta Promotion date of Wed, Jan 24, 2024, and a Stable Release date of Tue, Feb 20, 2024.
This new feature could significantly impact how privacy, tracking, and online advertising intersect.
The latest update to WordPress, version 6.4, includes changes to how scripts are loaded on the front end that will improve page load times and performance for many sites.
Script loading strategies are now incorporated into the core and bundled themes of WordPress, improving the performance of loading scripts with defer and async attributes.
These attributes instruct the browser to load scripts in the background (async) or after the rest of the page has loaded (defer), which can significantly speed up the time it takes for a page to become interactive.
Faster Page Loads With Intelligent Script Handling
Previously, JavaScript files included in WordPress themes and plugins were loaded without specifying that they should load asynchronously. This meant they blocked other downloads and delayed page rendering while they were fetched and executed.
For website visitors, pages with WordPress content will load faster after an update, specifically improving the CWV’s first contentful paint (FCP) metric, which affects how fast the page first appears.
Behind the Scenes: How WordPress Achieved This
JavaScript files for blocks like navigation menus and embedded media from WordPress.com now has ‘defer’ added when enqueued. The wp-embed script for displaying embedded posts now utilizes ‘defer.’
Previously, the ability to add these attributes wasn’t standardized. With the introduction of a dedicated API in WordPress 6.3 and the full implementation in 6.4, developers now have a standardized way to control when their scripts load.
Additionally, the update moves the most deferred scripts back into the
section since they no longer block rendering. This allows the browser to discover and cache them earlier, improving performance.
A few lower-priority scripts, like the one for comment replies, will remain in the footer but are loaded asynchronously with ‘async’ so they load in parallel with other resources.
Real-World Impacts For Website Visitors
For website visitors, pages with WordPress content will load faster after updating. There will be less “jank” or shifting around of page elements after the page first appears.
These changes lay the groundwork for even better optimizations in the future.
Every digital agency is actively seeking new ways to improve their clients’ marketing performance.
While your digital marketing strategy may emphasize improving SEO, increasing click rates, and decreasing bounce rates, there exists an often-overlooked approach that many agencies miss.
There could be a hidden treasure trove for conversion rates right before you.
Here’s everything you need to know about accessibility, and what you can do to boost your clients’ performance.
The Untapped Part Of Your Marketing Strategy
A powerful component of a holistic marketing strategy that has untapped potential to boost performance and engagement is web accessibility.
So, it’s highly likely that most of your competitors have not added this to their web strategy – giving you a potential instant advantage by implementing it.
By making your clients’ websites easier to understand, navigate, read, and crawl, you’ll naturally gain:
Expanded site reach: Significantly expand your client site’s reach, ensuring inclusivity and a superior user experience for all. In fact, 1.3 billion people live with some form of disability; by adding web accessibility you’re potentially gaining scores of new users for your clients’ target audience.
Dialed-in user experience: By refining the web experience to cater to every individual’s unique requirements, especially for those with disabilities, you naturally create a faster, cleaner experience for all users.
Improved navigation: By eliminating barriers that might obstruct smooth navigation, you’ll naturally create an optimized on-site link structure.
Do any of these sound familiar?
If you’re dialed into SEO and Core Web Vitals (CWV), you’ll recognize these as contributing factors of ranking signals.
So, when you’re looking to enhance your value proposition and amplify client results, web accessibility is a game-changer. Not only does it foster digital equality, but it also drives tangible marketing results.
4 Steps To Boost Website Performance By Improving Web Accessibility
Web accessibility and your agency’s marketing performance share the same DNA.
Think of them as two sides of the same coin or, better yet, as kindred spirits in the website world.
Here are four common performance-boosting components that are linked to embedding accessibility into your client sites.
Step 1. Add Alt Text For Improved Search Visibility
When your clients’ websites are accessible, they are also telling the search engines what they want to hear.
For example, properly labeled images improve both accessibility and image searchability. Alt text is critical to convey information in images and illustrations to make sure people using assistive technology can get the maximum context and understanding of the overall content.
How To Write High-Impact Alt Text
To improve your search visibility and increase the chances of your clients’ websites showing up higher on more search engine results pages (SERPs):
Understand which images are informative, decorative, functional, or complex.
Identify informative images, then write the text alternative for images using the essential information, describing it in detail. Don’t forget to include the emotional implications of the image.
Filter out decorative images, like a flourish or stylistic elements that lack meaningful context. Then, write the alt text as “null” as in, so that screen readers won’t waste users’ time by announcing it.
Take your functional images, which describe what happens when you click an image, like the ‘download’ icon. Then, make sure your alt text doesn’t describe those images but instead, denotes their functionality.
Grab your complex infographics or diagrams, then compose alt text describing the information laid out in the images.
The Easy Way
It’s labor-intensive to manually go back and write descriptions for the hundreds or thousands of images on your site. Instead, save time and money and let UserWay’s automated Image Alt tool generate the alt text for you, using AI. This is one of the most popular features of UserWay’s AI-Powered Accessibility Widget.
Alt Text Best Practices
To make sure your alt text provides your readers with everything they need to understand, and make sure search engines can rank your clients’ content:
Less is more: Ensure the length of alternative text is under 125 characters when possible, spaces included.
Don’t skimp on quality: Pay close attention to the accuracy of the information and insight the image provides in that short amount of words.
Don’t use images of text, whenever possible, except in logos. If used, the image alt text should include the same words as in the image.
For image maps, with multiple clickable areas, a group alt text gives the overall context of the map. Any clickable area should also have its own individual alternative text, describing the link’s destination and purpose.
Don’t ever assign a random, vague, or ambiguous alternative text description to an image simply to increase your accessibility score. This could lead to confusion and frustration for a screen reader user. Alt text accessibility is rooted in providing meaningful and functional alternative means of usability. Poor or random alt text descriptions can arguably be worse than having no alt text at all.
Step 2. Create Clear Header Structure: Best Practices For Increased Rankings & Better Content Understanding
Similarly, clear heading structures laid out in the proper order aid screen readers and search engine bots alike.
The result? You may see a boost in rankings that can set your agency a notch above your competitors.
How To Write Keyword-Driven Headers – Best Practices
A great keyword and header structure strategy can improve your clients’ performance in the long run, on more search engine results pages (SERPs). It will also help every website visitor find exactly what they’re looking for.
Place main and secondary keywords so that both search engine bots and readers can understand the content on your clients’ pages.
For keywords in headers, you need to balance your SEO and accessibility considerations. For example, while you need your target keywords to appear, it’s important to make sure the phrasing and context are also simple to understand and direct.
Structure your headers in the right hierarchy so that screen reader users, for example, can easily navigate content without wasting their time. That means tagging your H1 and H2’s so that content is read out in the right order, and more easily navigable.
Don’t forget that headings must be laid out in the right order, meaning, in a sequential way. So no skipping around from H1 directly to H3.
Step 3. Strengthen UI/UX: Scan For Accessibility Barriers To Improve Your Site For All Visitors
With 88% of digital visitors vowing never to return after one poor site experience, it’s clear that accessibility isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Read on to find out how fixing accessibility issues has been linked to boosted performance.
How user-friendly are your clients’ sites, especially for people with disabilities?
Are you ensuring all users enjoy an intuitive browsing experience?
UI/UX Best Practices
These best practices range from employing certified testers using assistive technology to test your site, all the way to automated tools that instantly check your accessibility score.
Employ certified testers to create real use cases using assistive technology, like eye trackers, different brands of screen readers, or braille readers.
Schedule your manual testing on a recurring basis, at least once or twice a year, so that you can maintain your high standards of usability as your content evolves.
Augment manual testing with real-time automated scanning of web pages that can work in the background, and alert you to any changes in usability.
Nothing speaks louder than solid conversion rates.
They’re the definitive measure of a campaign’s effectiveness in turning interest into measurable results.
Let’s look at a case study of how one business builds accessibility into its client websites and sees improved conversion results.
Case Study: How Natural Intelligence Amped Up Conversions With UserWay
Meet Natural Intelligence, the company behind big names like Top10.com and BestMoney.com. Founded in 2009, they’ve made it their mission to simplify your decision-making, influencing 50 million consumer choices annually on their sites globally.
The Challenge:
While boasting a 60-strong product team obsessed with delivering top-notch consumer experiences, they hit a snag: making their sites welcoming for everyone. They tried to find a solution that catered to both web accessibility and performance but it was like ‘hunting for a unicorn’.
The Solution:
UserWay’s AI-powered Widget changed the game for Natural Intelligence, enabling them to achieve their accessibility and compliance goals. And the numbers? They speak for themselves. Within months of collaborating with UserWay, Natural Intelligence saw a significant boost in its metrics:
Click Rates: Up by 1.0%.
Bounce Rates: Down 0.5%.
Earnings per Click: Boosted by 2.4%.
Earnings per Visitor: A rise of 3.5%.
The connection between web accessibility and higher conversion rates isn’t just coincidental — it’s consequential.
Natural Intelligence’s client sites are now more inclusive than ever, engaging more users and racking up credibility points.
So, when strategizing for the next big boost in conversions and revenue, ask yourself: Is web accessibility a part of your digital strategy?
Page speed and how it relates to your user’s experience is a ranking signal.
Once users have decided to open your website, it’s important to ensure the website loads quickly and provides a good experience. If users can quickly find the information they need, they are more likely to check out the rest of your website or go through your checkout flow.
Rank higher in Google and increase organic traffic.
Deliver a better user experience and increase conversions.
Reduce costs for you and your visitors.
For example, 70% of consumers say they are less likely to buy something online or return to a website if the website is slow. Google has also published a number of case studies explaining that good Core Web Vitals also lead to more sales.
How Page Speed Helps You Rank Higher On Google Search Results
Google collects page speed data from real Chrome users and uses that as a ranking signal.
It looks at three performance metrics, called the Core Web Vitals (CWV).
Core Web Vitals are made up of:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
First Input Delay (FID), which will be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in 2024.
If at least 75% of website visitors have an experience that Google rates as “good” across all three metrics, you will get the maximum ranking benefit.
How Do You Check Core Web Vitals?
The CWV report in Google Search Console tells you if you need to optimize page experience on your website.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Pro Tip: Use DebugBear to measure your Core Web Vitals automatically and get actionable steps to speed up your site.
What Does Each Core Web Vital Mean?
Each CWV focuses on the speed of different aspects of your website.
Your goal is for your website to be in “Good” standing for each metric.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The LCP metric measures how quickly your website loads. Specifically, it looks at how soon after navigating to a page the biggest content element shows up, for example, a hero image or content heading.
The Largest Contentful Paint score should be 2.5 seconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures whether the page layout is stable after content first starts to appear. If a layout shift occurs that means some page elements change place after they first show up. This provides a poor user experience, as the user needs to reorient themselves to continue reading or might accidentally click on the wrong button.
The Cumulative Layout Shift score should be lower than 0.1. It is calculated by looking at the size of the content that has shifted and the distance it has shifted by.
First Input Delay (FID) & Interaction To Next Paint (INP)
These two metrics measure how quickly your website responds to user input. When a user clicks on a button on your page, it might take a second or more for the page content to update in response to the user input, which makes the website feel laggy and unresponsive.
Aim for a FID score below 100 milliseconds and an INP score below 200 milliseconds.
How A Fast Website Reduces Costs
Finally, optimizing web performance may also save hosting costs for your website as less CPU processing is needed and less data needs to be downloaded, leading to lower bandwidth charges.
Many website visitors also have bandwidth limits on their mobile data plans and they may incur additional costs when going over the limit.
Step 1: Run A Website Performance Test
Want to see how quickly your website loads and get recommendations to speed it up? Running a free website speed test lets you assess how your website is performing now and provides a detailed report on how to improve it.
Here’s an example of what a test result looks like:
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Page speed testing tools can also identify potential optimizations you can apply to your website, like reducing server response time, removing render-blocking scripts, or optimizing your images.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Even if you already meet Google’s CWV standards you may still benefit by optimizing further. Since Google looks at the fastest 75% of experiences there may still be a quarter of your visitors who have a suboptimal experience.
For example, some users may be on a slow mobile connection or on airplane wifi. Optimizing page speed for these users may lead to purchases you may have lost otherwise.
Step 2: Set Up Website Monitoring
Running a test on your website tells you how fast your website is now. But continuously monitoring your website and having historical data available means that you can:
Get alerts when there’s a new performance issue.
Check if performance optimizations have the expected impact.
Compare test results on different days and understand the differences.
Create reports that show your team and management how your site is doing.
Types Of Site Speed Monitoring
There are two main types of page speed data that you can monitor:
Lab or synthetic data is collected on a schedule in a controlled testing environment.
Field or real user data is collected from end users when they visit the website.
Lab data is more detailed and easier to collect, while real user data can show you how users are actually experiencing your website.
Scheduled lab-based page speed tests are easy to set up, provide detailed reporting, and can be configured both for your own sites and those of your competitors.
However, lab-based tests come with some limitations:
User interactions after the initial page load aren’t measured (unless you’ve scripted them as part of the test setup).
Scheduled tests are run with a consistent device configuration, like screen size and network connection speed. However, real users use a wide range of devices and experience varying network conditions.
You only get data for the page URLs that you’ve set up monitoring for.
Some metrics like INP and CLS depend heavily on how the user interacts with the page after it’s loaded.
The content element responsible for the LCP metric also often varies based on the device. For a user with a large screen, the LCP element may be an image. On a small screen, the LCP element may be a heading, with the image appearing somewhere below the fold.
Real User Website Performance Monitoring: Benefits & Limitations
Collecting data from real users provides a number of advantages:
It’s what ultimately matters to your visitors.
Google uses real user data for rankings.
You get data for the whole spectrum of user experiences: different browsers, devices, networks, and user behavior.
Data can be collected for your whole website instead of for specific page URLs.
However, you need to make changes to your website to set up real user monitoring, and each test result will have less detail than a full lab-based test. Real user site speed data and scheduled performance tests each have their pros and cons, and they ultimately complement each other.
Step 3: Set Up Real User Monitoring
To collect data from real users you need to install an analytics snippet on your website from the website monitoring tool of your choice.
Once your account is set up, switch to the “RUM” tab and click “Get Started”.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
This will generate an embed code that you need to install on your website. You can add it to the HTML template of your website, or install it via a tag manager tool like Google Tag Manager.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Once this is set up you’ll start to see real-world Core Web Vitals experiences for your website.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
You can also see where in the world users have a good experience and where your site loads more slowly.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Step 4: Use Real User Data To Pinpoint Specific Performance Metrics
If your website isn’t doing well on one of the Core Web Vitals metrics you can dive more deeply into this issue.
DebugBear provides metric-specific dashboards that show you:
Which of your pages are fast and which are slow.
The distribution of user experiences.
Whether a typical user experience is fast or slow.
How page speed has changed over time, both for the average user and for the slowest 10% of user experiences.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
When debugging the LCP it’s also important to know which page element was the biggest piece of content for different users. DebugBear shows a breakdown of these elements and how long users need to wait for it to appear.
That way you can identify what page optimizations would have the biggest impact on the largest number of users.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
The same applies to INP where you need to know what page interaction led to an interaction delay for the user.
Finally, DebugBear can also report to you how page speed metrics correlate with other metrics like bounce rate:
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
How Real User Monitoring Is Different From Google’s Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX)
Whether you own analytics or look at Google data, in both cases you’re working with real user metrics.
Why not just rely on the Google data exclusively?
Google provides data that’s aggregated over a 28-day period, so after a change on your website, it takes a long time to see the effect.
CrUX data is only available for pages that reach a minimum traffic volume.
Google only collects data from users who are logged into their Google account in Chrome.
To get started, simply enter your website URL and pick a test location, test device, and monitoring schedule.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Once you’ve set up monitoring, a dashboard will tell you how your website has been doing on the CWV metrics of the last few weeks.
You can also monitor competitor sites to see how your site speed compares.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
For each monitored page you also get a page-specific dashboard with performance trends for that specific URL and a detailed analysis of each speed metric.
For example, in the screenshot below you can see:
How the Largest Contentful Paint metric has changed over time.
The image element that is responsible for triggering the LCP milestone.
In addition to running its own performance tests, DebugBear also continuously checks the real user data that Google uses for rankings. This data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report, or CrUX for short.
We can see that on this page more than 86% of visitors are having a good experience.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Step 6: Set Up Alerts If Web Performance Drops
Even if you have a fast website you’ll still run into performance issues from time to time. For example after:
Uploading a new image to a landing page.
Installing a new third-party script.
Changing a configuration option in your hosting setup.
Gradual growth of your database size.
DebugBear can send regression alerts via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.
To avoid noisy alerts all tests are re-run if they would trigger an issue. That way notifications are only sent for reproducible issues.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
As you can see from the alert above DebugBear also runs a Google Lighthouse audit audit with each test, including the accessibility and SEO scores. That way basic accessibility and SEO monitoring are also included.
Step 7: Compare Speed Test Results
Okay, so you’ve received a web performance alert and see a change in your metrics. What next?
DebugBear offers a compare mode that lets you compare test results before and after a regression to see exactly what changed and how it’s impacting users.
The screenshot below shows an example where a new third-party script was added to a website and visitors now wait much longer for page content to show up.
Once you know what’s causing the issue you can decide how to proceed. You could:
The comparison tool is also a great way to visually communicate a regression or the impact of a successful performance optimization.
DebugBear offers both a filmstrip view that shows each rendering frame of the website one by one, and a video view that shows how a real user would experience the loading speed before and after a change. You can export this visualization as an MP4 video file and embed it in team or client presentations.
A screenshot from DebugBear, August 2023
Stay On Top Of Your Core Web Vitals
Ready to start prioritizing your website performance, rank higher in Google, and deliver a better user experience? Try DebugBear for free for 14 days.
