Core Web Vitals Impact on Salesforce Commerce Cloud Sites

When Google announced back in May that there were three core website metrics that all website owners ought to pay attention to if they wanted to manage and improve their search engine rankings, the race began to tweak and improve them, and be rewarded for providing site visitors a faster, and thus better, online experience.

These metrics, the three Core Web Vitals, therefore have a huge impact on your ecommerce store.

Before we move forward, it’s important to keep in mind that the Core Web Vitals do not populate the entire landscape of webpage metrics. But they do provide website owners with the priority in which they ought to focus their attention.

The Core Web Metrics

First Input Delay: This measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (for example when they click a link or press a key) to when the browser can respond to that demand. It is measured in milliseconds. It highlights the first impression that a user has of your page’s responsiveness.

Largest Contentful Paint: This measures how long it takes from the page beginning to load to the largest text block or image loads on the screen. Essentially, the lower the LCP the better its performance.

Cumulative Layout Shift: This measures the aggregated (or cumulative) score of all the unexpected shifts in layout. It provides insight into a page’s visual stability because it demonstrates the experience of a user.

As such, Core Web Vitals have a knock on effect when it comes to the performance of ecommerce sites. And like what has transpired in the past, it’s likely that the weight of importance of these metrics will shift and change as the metrics that make up good user experience are fluid.

“Like any other search engine, Google works hard to surface the highest quality and most relevant results for users’ queries,” said Gary Illyes of Google. “CWV has nothing to do with either of those… not even remotely. So it’s extremely unlikely that CWV would ever become the primary factor for organic traffic. That’s not to say you can ignore CWV, though.”

Impact on your ecommerce site

There are dozens and dozens of webpage metrics that go into the entire inner workings of how a page works and is experienced by users. And that also means the experience of online shoppers as they roam through the aisles of digital shops.

Keeping consistent records of Core Web Vitals and tweaking the scores of them are the bare necessities of a successful ecommerce website. And so if you do have an ecommerce store and are looking into ways to improve your Core Web Vitals scores, then consider the following questions.

1. Core Web Vitals have effectively replaced AMP pages. So how key are AMP pages for your ecommerce site?
2. Are you making use of the free tools available to analyze your Core Web Vitals, such as Page Speed Insights and Google Lighthouse?
3. Have you considered the benefits of resizing the videos and images on your website to boost its speed?
4. Have you noticed any friction on your webpages that can be fixed for better performance?
5. What is the general SEO health of your site?
6. Do you know how much work and development it would take to reach your ideal Core Web Vitals scores?
7. Looking ahead, Google has said that they are considering displaying a badge for good page experience as a featured snippet on the search engine results page. And to be honored with such a badge, it’s expected that a page must get the green light across all three metrics: First Input Delay, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

So with this in mind, would this be a reachable goal? Could such a badge help separate your business from competitors?

So whether you power your ecommerce site using Salesforce Commerce Cloud on Site Genesis or the latest SFRA version, ArganoUV is well experienced in integrating and elevating Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites and was one of the first companies to complete a project to improve Core Web Vitals.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Core Web Vitals agencies. Contact us to see how we can work together.