Magento Core Web Vitals – a new ranking signal for your Magento 2 e-commerce

Google Core Web Vitals for better Page Experience

As webmasters, bloggers, small businesses, and companies with websites, we are all at the mercy of Google. Simple changes in their algorithm and platform can have a huge impact on how our websites rank and perform on the google search engine result page. Google makes these changes almost every time and website SEO is often caught off guard. This time changes are focused on-page experience and measured by three metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint LCP
• First Input Delay FID
• Cumulative Layout Shift CLS

Core Web Vitals in Magento Store to improve User Experience

Google has introduced a new update called Core web vitals, which is a new ranking signal in May 2021. The core web vitals update combines with previous user experience-related signals.

Google makes these changes in the algorithm and announced it so that webmasters and small/medium business websites can better prepare their Magento 2 website SEO for the algorithm update. However, the google core web vitals update is still a bit confusing for some people, hence we have written this post to shed more light on this upcoming update and how you can better prepare and optimize your Magento store for it.

What are Core Web Vitals

Google core web vitals are real-time experience metrics that google analyses on websites. These include things like; the web page speed, the visual stability of the webpage, and the users’ interaction and responsiveness of the webpage.

Simply put, the user experience of your mobile and desktop Magento 2 website visitors in terms of speed and how they interact with your webpage.

The core web vitals combine with pre-existing UX-related signals like the mobile-friendliness of your Magento 2 webpage, intrusive interstitial, and HTTPS security.

These core web vitals updates are not focused on the text and content on the Magento 2 webpage, which is often the considered metrics for most ranking signals, but more focused on the overall real-world user experience of your web page.

How can Core Web Vitals improve User Experience and Affect Rankings

The Google core web vitals update is going to become a new ranking signal and affect all regular search results on both mobile and desktop based on the 3 core web vitals metric. Also, the core web vitals will become a necessary ranking signal for Magento 2 websites that want to appear in Google top stories.

Also, research has shown that nearly 87 percent of e-commerce websites are not optimized to meet the requirements of the web core vitals updates, this can result in loss of sales revenue, especially if your users are having a hard time navigating your website.

Already, the overall user page experience on your Magento 2 website can have a huge impact on your sales, but soon, it will also affect your organic search rankings. Therefore, it is important to optimize your eCommerce store now to improve the core web vitals and escape the side effect that comes with not meeting the web core vitals requirement.

The Three Core Web Vitals Metrics

1. Largest Contentful Paint LCP

The LCP core web vitals metric measures the amount of time it takes for the largest piece of content on a webpage to load.

This content on the page is usually the videos or product images on a webpage that takes a long time to render when the page is loading. Google’s recommendation for Largest Contentful Paint LCP is 2.5 seconds or less to be fully loaded. If the LCP is above 2.5 seconds then you need to improve your webpage as it can affect your rankings since May 2021.

Furthermore, for Magento 2 eCommerce websites the largest sufficient paint often measures the time it takes the image of your product to load. If this takes a lot of time it’ll not only affect your eCommerce site ranking, it can also cause you to lose a customer to a competitor with a faster loading site following the core web vitals.