World of E-Commerce is expanding and so it makes it harder and tougher to attract and retain the attention of consumers in order to lock-in that all important conversion. In this quickly moving digital landscape, it is imperative to have a close eye on the user experience for driving success.
The Core Web Vitals are a set of real world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience —three aspects of web performance called Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift— over several seconds during navigation time.
Core Web Vitals were developed by Google to help site owners understand how visitors experience their sites. These metrics are critical for improving site performance, SEO rankings and ultimately improving conversions for Shopify store owners.
This article will consider how Core Web Vitals directly relate to Shopify stores, their general impact on store performance, and what Shopify merchants can do to improve this.
What Are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals consist of three primary metrics that evaluate how users experience a web page:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the load time of the biggest visible element on the screen. You want FCP to be as fast as possible, at less than 2.5 seconds for an equals a quick site.
- First Input Delay (FID): FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. You should aim at an FID lower than 100 milliseconds for a good user experience.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures the unexpected layout shifts occurring as a page is loading, and therefore helps compute the visual stability of a website. Content stability as it loads should meet a CLS score of < 0.1
These metrics were introduced to help website owners create faster, more stable, and more responsive websites, all of which are important for Shopify stores.
Why Core Web Vitals Matter for Shopify Stores
Improved User Experience
Providing a friction-less user experience is paramount to any eCommerce operation — endeavoring to secure loyal customers means that they continue to return. When your Shopify store is slow to load, or if an element does not behave the way it should (like moving under your thumb as you scroll), what happens is potential customers become upset, which will mean that less units are closed.
Core Web Vitals allows you to recognize these performance bottlenecks and make necessary improvements in order to maintain fast, stable, and responsive sites. The result of a good user experience: increased engagement, reduced bounce rates, and higher conversions.
SEO and Google Ranking
What are Core Web Vitals in Google? These measures have already been incorporated by Google into its ranking algorithm as elements of the wider Page Experience Update. Sites with superior Core Web Vitals scores, therefore, have a higher likelihood of ranking more favorably in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Especially critical in driving organic traffic for Shopify store owners. When you optimize your site for these Core Web Vitals, it can help to improve its search ranking and make your store easier for potential customers to find.
Increased Conversion Rates
Speed and responsiveness affect conversion rates directly. According to studies, a one-second delay in page load time can lead to 7% reduction in conversions. Low Core Web Vitals can significantly impact satisfaction with users and lead to loss of sales. Conversely, designing for speed of loading and browsing experience will keep customers on your site for longer, increase the number of products they view, and improve conversions.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile traffic accounts for such a large portion of eCommerce, making it more important than ever to optimize your Shopify store for mobile. Mobile-Friendliness — Core Web Vitals makes your site more useful to those who are using a phone. Understanding this data will help you to build and offer a mobile friendly experience keeping the empowered shopper in mind.
Optimizing for mobile leads to improved load times, reduced bounce rates, and hence improved user satisfaction which helps in boosting conversion rates
How to Optimize Core Web Vitals for Shopify Stores
Improving your Shopify store’s Core Web Vitals may seem challenging, but there are several steps you can take to boost your scores:
1. Optimize Images
Shopify loading time will also be affected by the size of uncompressed images, which is one of the negative impacts on LCP score as well. Compressing images means you can reduce file sizes without reducing quality. Opt for newer, smaller, more mobile-friendly image formats like WebP.
2. Minimize JavaScript and CSS
Too Much JavaScript and CSS can slow down both server to screen and interactivity, impacting FID & CLS scores. Shopify store owners have control over the resources of render-blocking, and they can help in making these less or decrease their loading speed by eliminating such JavaScript and CSS files. This helps to speed up time of interaction with the site and reduce layout shifts.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Shopify provides a global CDN for all stores, but adding another CDN to the mix, can help improve content delivery (especially for sites with lots of media). CDN caches the static content on their server and distributes it to multiple servers so that your website can load fast for website visitors from all around the world.
4. Reduce Third-Party Apps
Shopify is more than just an online store — it is a complex system of third-party apps that are designed specifically for all of the functionality people want to add into their stores. But since the overuse of apps can slow down your site, everything that uses JavaScript is negative for all three Core Web Vitals.
Look at the apps installed on your store — and start retiring unnecessary or redundant ones. These tools should prompt you whenever new app installations are affecting the performance of your site, and you can also manually monitor those impacts through Google PageSpeed Insights or Shopify’s inbuilt performance reports.
5. Enable Browser Caching
Browser caching can store some data locally on users’ devices marking the time it takes to load pages for returning users. Browser Caching: Shopify supports this by default but you still need to configure cache expiration times for images and scripts etc so that the same file doesn’t have to be downloaded each time a user accesses it.
6. Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content
To speed up this, you need to prioritize above-the-fold elements so that it loads first once the page is opened. You can use so-called lazy load resources, e.g. images below the fold or additional scripts that are not needed until after all above-the-fold content is delivered. This optimization tactic helps LCP by guaranteeing that your Shopify store is interactive right away.
7. Monitor Performance Regularly
And last but not least, you should be keeping an eye on the performance of your Shopify store to continue making changes (ie more optimization) when needed. You can use some of the following tools: Google Lighthouse WebPageTest Chrome DevTools Monitoring these metrics means that your Shopify store never slows or won’t respond and is consumer-friendly as always.
Conclusion
Core Web Vitals Is A Critical Part Of Ensuring An Exceptional Shopify User Experience Support for these particular metrics allows Shopify store owners to enhance the loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability of their sites, all of which are critical to driving traffic levels upwards, boosting SEO rankings and improving overall conversion rates.
With the increasing competition in the eCommerce space, optimizing for Core Web Vitals is not only a technical necessity but a business edge that helps you avoid getting lost in the sea of competitors.
It does not matter whether you are starting a new Shopify store or have an existing one be sure to keep your eye on Core Web Vitals that make your online store a better and more user-friendly platform for customers.
