In the coming months, Google will deprecate the page experience report within Google Search Console, the mobile usability report, and the mobile-friendly testing tool. The core web vitals and HTTPs report will remain in Google Search Console, Danny Sullivan of Google announced.
Google somewhat clouded this announcement in the news of the helpful content guidance gaining details on page experience, maybe a PR spin, to losing these two reports that some SEOs may have overly obsessed about over the years.
The original page experience report launched in Search Console in April 2021 and was designed for just mobile pages. Google added a desktop version with the launch of the desktop version of the algorithm in January 2022. Now that it is 2023, Google is going to remove that page experience report completely and “will transform into a new page that links to our general guidance about page experience,” Danny Sullivan wrote.
In December 2023, Google will also drop Google Search Console’s mobile usability report (originally launched in 2016), the mobile-friendly test tool (launched in 2016) and mobile-friendly test API. Google said this is not because mobile friendly and usability is not important, Google said, “it remains critical for users, who are using mobile devices more than ever, and as such, it remains a part of our page experience guidance. But in the nearly ten years since we initially launched this report, many other robust resources for evaluating mobile usability have emerged, including Lighthouse from Chrome.” I think, again, this is about resource issues with the recent layoffs.
So be prepared that these tools are going away and you won’t be able to use them for client reporting in the coming months.
Here is what the report looks for my corporate site (click to enlarge):
Here is an example of a site that saw a huge spike when the filter was added to the performance report:
Here is an example of the mobile usability report:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
