What is Google’s Core Web Vitals Update and How Does it Impact Your Ecommerce on Salesforce?
As of May of 2021, Google officially introduced Core Web Vitals to be included with their existing page experience metrics. These vitals are a subset of Google’s Web Vitals, which give users an inside look at how Google ranks your site for one of their critical quality indicators, user experience. As questions continue to rise around these new metrics, we’re here to break down what you need to consider with this new algorithm and how it impacts your ecommerce site.
Defining Core Web Vitals
According to Google, Core Web Vitals is made up of three metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport, from when the user requests the URL. The largest element is typically an image or video, or perhaps a large block-level text element. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is actually loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user first clicks. This is important on pages where the user needs to do something because this is when the page has become interactive.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page. The score is zero to any positive number, where zero means no shifting, and the larger the number, the more layout shift on the page. This is important because having page elements shift while a user is trying to interact with it is a bad user experience.
Core Web Vitals are fluid and likely to change from year to year. User expectations will help drive what Google ranks as a good website experience.
How Core Web Vitals Will Impact Your Ecommerce Site
“Like any other search engine, Google works hard to surface the highest quality and most relevant results for user’ queries. 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.” Gary Illyes, Google
Google has 100’s of ranking factors that attribute to page rank, but shopper experience has become more and more important for ecommerce sites. Brands need to keep a pulse on their site score and remediate any issues, including site speed or broken page elements that could threaten your ranking.
Core Web Vitals and Salesforce: Considerations to Improve Your Score
Looking to improve your Google ranking and increase your Core Web Vitals score?
Here’s what to consider:
- Are you leveraging free tools, like Google lighthouse and Page Speed Insights, to analyze your Core Web Vitals?
- Have you resized images and videos on landing pages for improved site speed?
- Is there friction on any of your pages that can be remediated for better site performace?
- What is the overall SEO health of your current website? Have you created and reviewed your technical benchmarks recently?
- Core Web Vitals will be replacing amp pages. How important are amp pages for your website?
- What is the level of effort and development needed to achieve desired scores?
- Google has started beta testing a Core Web Vital Badge as a featured snippet in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) pages. You must pass all three Core Web Vitals metrics to earn these badges LCP, FID, CLS. How competitive is your search vertical? Could this badge help differentiate your listings from your competitors?
How Your SI Can Help
If you are managing an ecommerce site built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud that is either on controllers (Site Genesis) or SFRA, Pixel can help identify your templates to determine the best course of action for improving your performance metrics. Google’s latest announcement is yet another reminder as to the importance of site ranking and a deeper look into the intricate algorithms that determine your ecommerce’s site performance.
