Google lights blue touch paper on Page Experience for desktop

The clock is now officially ticking for any website developers who've been saying "Page Experience only affects mobile" to clients, with Google setting their deadline for when it will start to roll Page Experience into desktop search as a ranking factor. It's coming, and it's coming in February 2022.

Although Google are saying that this is not a "major update" there are likely to be a large number of websites who see their rankings shift and if you've got a client base who are switched on and monitoring their rankings then you can expect some emails and phone calls come February. This also big news for Wordpress developers and users as Wordpress has been notoriously poor on Core Web Vitals and Page Experience, to the point that the core Wordpress team has initiated a project to improve the performance of Wordpress.  (In my view, not a moment too soon - when you're losing ground to the abomination that is Wix... you've got problems). If you want to see how you site is performing, the Google Pagespeed index tool should tell you everything you need to know: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/