Best Practices for Magento Stores to Score Well on Core Web Vitals

2021 was when Google updated its one of the most crucial algorithms, incorporating page experience as a ranking signal to factor in the pages’ user experience and reflect in the SERPs. Generating meaningful and SEO-relevant content is no longer sufficient. Magento store owners have to pay extra heed to the overall consumer experience and ease of navigating an eCommerce website.

Fortunately, Google has announced various elements that contribute to determining the overall webpage, in this case, web-store experience.

1. Core Web Vitals :

Google Core Web Vitals is a conglomeration of three performance metrics, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and the First Input Delay (FID), factoring the visual loading, interactivity, and visual stability of the webpage.

2. Mobile-Responsive:

Google scores the eCommerce stores based on mobile-friendliness, considering the ease of use on mobile devices, including content readability, clickability, and accessibility of on-page elements and links.

3. HTTPS:

Focus on if the connection is secure and being served over HTTPS as recommended.

4. Safe Browsing: 

Google assesses Magento stores for security issues such as malware, phishing, and hacked content. Google wants to ensure a safe browning for every user. 

5. Non-Intrusive Interstitials:

Ensuring that important content is not obstructed for users while they are browsing.

We want to ensure that you, as an eCommerce retailer, are ready for this change. Hence, we have put together a list of tips and tricks to optimize your eCommerce Magento store for page experience. These will envelop tips to equip your website with faster visual loading, enhanced mobile usability, and improved overall security.

Each eCommerce website is different with different products, and there is non one template to fit in. Still, we have tried to touch upon all the possibly significant changes you can make to your Magento store to optimize it and score well on the Google Core Web Vitals.

Rank Better with Good LCP

LCP factors the time taken for the largest content element above the fold to load. The element can be an image, video, or even a block of text. A good LCP score is 2.5s or less.

1. A better hosting plan is preferable as TTFB, Time Taken to First Byte, is essential and represents a fast server response time. A slow or shared hosting server will need considerable updating.
2. You can merge JS files to reduce the number of server requests. Also, defer the noncritical JS for the above-the-fold content.
3. You must optimize images, compress, resize, and convert to the appropriate format to reduce aid faster loading time.
4. Preloading hero images with CSS or JS can significantly reduce the LCP. Hero images are the most significant content element above the fold. Loading them faster is a crucial part of the page experience.

Optimize Magento Store for CLS

CLS reflects the aftereffects of unexpected layout shifts in the webpage without the user’s input. A good CLS score is 0.1, which means the page is visually stable. Two factors determine your CLS score: how much did the shift affect the viewport, and secondly, how far the content elements moved during the shift compared to the viewport.

1. Specifying the width and height attributes of every content element, including the images of the eCommerce store, will prevent layout shifts.
2. You should avoid inserting pop-ups and ads above other content.
3. Magento stores let you use placeholders for layout stability. Use the placeholders to occupy the exact dimensions of the images and videos.
4. Using optimized fonts can prevent flashes of invisible text and layout shifts. Also, using system fonts can throw out the need for the browser to download the font file while fetching the page.

Score Well at FID

FID computation needs data from real-world users interacting with your Magento store. The first impression is the last, they say. This stands true for computing FID. FID measures how long the browser takes to process the first user interaction on the page. Bad FID facilitates the churn rate and frustrates store visitors.

1. Break up longer tasks into smaller fragments to significantly decrease the overloading of the main thread. This would prevent the delay in the execution of the user’s input. The UI is unresponsive while executing a coding block. Code splitting is the solution.
2. Magento stores usually have multiple third-party tags and analytics that keep the thread busy and make the store unresponsive. The solution is to use on-demand loading of these codes, prioritize the elements with the greeted value to the users.
3. Web workers work wonders for FID optimization running in the JS on background threads. This does not impact the main thread.
4. Polyfills, the JS-based browser fallbacks that allow modern functionalities on old browsers, download a ton of unnecessary code. Reduce the number of polyfills and use only when necessary.

The Google Core Web Vitals are a massive leap in the algorithm update to improve user experience. These vitals being a part of the ranking systems points out to being here for a long time. So, the intelligent choice would be to analyze, enhance and monitor. Magento store optimization for the Core Web Vitals is the key to success here, as for eCommerce stores having similar content, the faster one will rank better.

For a deeper dive into the know-hows of the Google Core Web Vitals and how to optimize your Magento stores to rank better, check out our latest eBook, “Google Core Web Vitals for Magento 2: A Technical Guide to Optimize Your Store.”

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