How can Magento stores score well on Core Web Vitals?

Google Core Web Vitals plays a vital role in improving the ranking of your website in search engines.

Also, it contributes to providing more recognition to your website and keeping your website well-organized and clean. The best part about this is that it offers a hassle-free user experience.

In the middle of June, Core Web Vitals became Google ranking signals. As a part of it, Google has incorporated page experience as a ranking signal to factor in the pages’ user experience.

Also, it is effectively reflected in the SERPs. Presently, it is not sufficient to generate SEO-relevant and meaningful content. Magento store owners must pay attention to the ease of navigating an eCommerce website and the overall consumer experience.

Fortunately, Google has announced different elements which contribute to determining the overall webpage, i.e., web-store experience.

So, now is the best time to examine Core Web Vitals to understand your eCommerce store’s importance effectively.

Core Web Vitals

There is the inclusion of three performance metrics in Google Core Web Vitals.

It includes the FID or First Input Delay, CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift, and LCP or Large Contentful Paint.

These play a significant role in factoring in the visual stability, interactivity, and visual Loading of the webpage.

Mobile-Responsive

Google scores the eCommerce store based on mobile responsiveness and the ease of use on mobile devices.

It includes content readability, accessibility, clickability of links, and on-page elements.

Safe Browsing

Google assesses Magento stores for security issues like phishing, malware, and hacked content. Google does this to ensure a safe browsing experience for each of the users.

HTTPS

Another important thing is to focus on whether the connection is secure and served over HTTPS as per the recommendations.

Non-Intrusive Interstitials

It is crucial to ensure that the critical content is not obstructed for users whenever they browse.

So, as an eCommerce retailer, you should always be ready for this change. The below-mentioned section will discuss the essential tips and tricks to optimize your Magento store for page experience.

By following these tips, you would be able to equip your website with improved overall security, enhanced mobile usability, and faster visual Loading.

How To Make Your Magento Store Core Vitals Ready?

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Here, we have discussed significant changes you can make to your Magento store to optimize it properly. By making all of these changes, you would score well on the Google Core Web Vitals.

Good LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) Helps You To Rank Better

LCP factors the time which is taken for the most significant content element above the fold to load. In this case, the element can be a video, image, or even a text block.

A good LCP score is considered to be 2.4s or less than that. LCP is an important metric that affects Loading. It measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to load.

You would be able to improve Largest Contentful Paint by adopting the below-mentioned approaches effectively:

1. A better hosting plan is preferable as Time Taken to First Byte or TTFB. It is essential, and it does the perfect representation of a fast server response time. A shared or slow hosting server will require substantial updating.So, your primary focus should be on better server response time. Also, you should adopt the best approaches to solve client-side rendering issues.
2. You must focus on optimizing images and compress, convert and resize those to the proper format to aid faster loading time. Therefore, you need to optimize video and images so that it renders faster.
3. You can merge JS files to reduce the number of server requests effectively. Another important thing is to deter the noncritical JS specifically for the above-the-fold content.
4. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that preloading hero images with JS or CSS can reduce the LCP. Talking about the hero images, these are regarded as the most critical content elements above the fold.

Loading them faster is a significant part of the page experience. So, your primary focus should be to remove render-blocking and unused JS and CSS

Optimize Magento Store For CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

CLS is such a metric that tends to have a lot of impact on visual stability. It is measured by how much the elements on the page shift around until they become still at the time of Loading.

CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift effectively reflects the aftereffects of unforeseen layout shifts in the webpage without the user’s input. A good CLS score is considered to be 0.1. It means that the webpage is visually stable.

Also, two significant factors determine your CLS score. It includes how much the shift specifically affects the viewport. Another factor is how far the content elements moved, particularly at the time of shift when compared to the viewport.

It is possible to improve the Cumulative Layout Shift by adopting the below-mentioned approaches like:

1. You should avoid inserting ads and popups above other content. So, all that you need is to remove or reduce interstitials, popups, and ads to improve the Cumulative Layout Shift effectively. It also includes any cookie banners or notices.
2. Specifying each content element’s height and width attributes is vital, including the eCommerce store images. By doing so, you would be able to prevent the layout shifts effectively.
3. Magento stores allow you to make use of placeholders for layout stability. All you need is to consider using the placeholders for occupying the exact dimensions of the videos and pictures.In this regard, you should make sure that the iframes, embeds, and images possess dimensions.
4. Another thing that you can do is to make use of optimized fonts. By using these, you would be able to prevent flashes of invisible layout shifts and text effectively.Again, by using system fonts, you can throw out the requirement for the browser to download the font file while it fetches the page. It would be best if you considered avoiding web fonts that cause FOUT or FOIT.
5. Another important thing is to manage or reduce any dynamically injected content.

Importance Of Scoring Well At FID Or First Input Delay

First Input Delay is such a metric that hugely affects interactivity. Also, it measures the time which it takes for the page to become interactive.

FID (First Input Delay) computation needs data specifically from real-time users. It involves those who interact with your Magento store.

In this regard, FID considers measuring how long the browser takes to process the first user interaction on the page effectively. Bad FID leads to the churn rate. So, it can be very frustrating to those who are visiting your eCommerce store. Here are given some of the best approaches in which you can improve the First Input Delay:

1. To reduce the main thread overloading, you should focus on breaking up longer tasks into smaller fragments. It would effectively prevent the delay in the user’s input implementationAt the time you are executing a coding block, the UI is unresponsive. In this case, the solution lies in code splitting.
2. Magento stores particularly have 3rd party analytics and tags, which keeps the thread busy. Also, it is responsible for making the store unresponsive.In this case, the solution is to use on-demand Loading of these codes. Again, you need to prioritize the elements with the greeted value, particularly to the users.
3. Web workers do a lot of work to optimize FID that runs in the JS, particularly on background threads.It does not have a considerable impact on the main thread. So, you would be able to minimize main-thread work by streamlining the long tasks.
4. Another essential term which you will come across is the polyfills which are the JS-based browser fallbacks. It is something that allows modern functionalities, particularly on the old browsers.Also, it will enable you to download a lot of unnecessary code. So, it becomes essential for you to effectively reduce the number of polyfills and use that only when required.
5. It would be best if you focused on removing the render-blocking JavaScript.
6. It would help if you shortened the JavaScript execution time.

Final Verdict

I hope you have found this guide to be very useful. By successfully following all of these tips, you would make your Magento store ready for core vitals.

The above section shows that the Google Core Web Vitals are a massive leap in the algorithm update for effectively improving user experience.

These vitals are considered to be a significant part of the ranking systems. It is expected to be here for an extended period. So, the best choice would be to enhance, analyze and monitor.

Here, the key to success is to optimize your Magento store for the Core Web Vitals. For eCommerce stores that have similar content, the faster one will attain a better rank.

Do let us know in the comment section below which of the tips you would like to try first. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

Contact us today if you need any assistance.