How To Optimize Magento Store Core Web Vitals For Improved SEO Rankings

ECommerce online store optimization for improved user experience is the key to sustaining a robust relationship with your customers. Google announced that the search engine giant will now evaluate the websites on three additional metrics – loading, interactivity, and visual stability. This update helps businesses to determine how well their store will perform for the end users, and how to deliver them an improved experience. These three-experience metrics were collectively termed Core Web Vitals. It paints a holistic picture of UX quality on various web pages.  

According to a recent survey, only 13% of eCommerce websites have passed the Core Web Vitals. Therefore, for Magento stores, Core Web Vitals become crucial to determine the success ratio of its website’s search engine rankings.   

This blog has some breakdown tips that will help you optimize Magento 2 Core Web Vitals with SEO-oriented. So, let’s get started!  

What are Core Web Vitals?  

Core Web Vitals include user-centric elements to measure the user experience on any website. The three characteristics of the surfing experience focused on by the Core Web Vitals include the page’s loading time, interactivity, and visual stability of the content available on the webpage.   

Each web essentials provide information related to various distinct aspects of the website, and its user experience. Let’s get deeper into it!

Read More: Top Magento Features To Upscale Your Ecommerce Business Growth

The three pillars of Core Web Vitals  

Core Web Vitals are user-focused, real-world elements that help assist website proprietors to evaluate user experience. It is further simplified into three most basic forms to measure the website’s performance:  

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)  

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) refers to the time the website takes for the most significant piece of content to display on the screen. For instance, the bottom of your Magento store may take some extended seconds to load, and your visitors may not see it coming first. On the other hand, the product catalog is visible instantly and is the site’s first appearance.   

Google considers an excellent LCP when it is less than 2.5 seconds.   

2. First Input Delay (FID)  

The First Input Delay (FID) refers to the amount of time taken by the system to respond to user interaction. There are various interactions happening on the Magento 2 store like a live chat button, a product description, or an add-to-cart button. The website visitors will consider the webpages as slow if all their interactions do not work efficiently.   

An impressive FID is less than 100 ms.  

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)  

While loading a webpage, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) stands for the layout shift. Magento support services and eCommerce general pages often comprise a wide range of product photos. If the image sizes aren’t the same, the entire page will shift as the large image comes into the picture.

Also, a single web page offers different resources that load asynchronously, pushing the pieces apart. For instance, ads, photos, videos, fonts, and headings – all change their sizes dynamically. This scenario results in users and consumers getting annoyed by the moving elements and unstable pages. As a result, they may leave the website and never turn back.   

An ideal CLS should be less than 0.1.  

How to optimize Magento 2 Core Web Vitals?  

The Core Web Vitals report appears in Google’s Search Console. This report is based on the field data from the Chrome-User-experience report that illustrates the performance of indexed URLs. It offers crucial information on page performance and changes required to optimize your Magento 2 Core Web Vitals for improved user experience on various platforms.  

Google has made page experience it’s an official ranking component. However, simply having your Magento Core Web Vitals tuned to perfection won’t guarantee top rank on the SERPs. In fact, page experience is one of the 200+ elements that Google will consider while ranking your webpage.   

Therefore, for an improved SEO experience on your Magento 2 website, address the three crucial web vitals by following these tips:  

1. Reduce blocking time to enhance LCP  

ECommerce store owners can eliminate render-blocking by moving critical code. In many cases, it gets easier to see that JS and CSS are included in the Head code. This code blocks rendering if no defer is associated with these inclusions. Also, avoid if “defer” was not required or reduced to the highest possible extent.   

At times, the JavaScript lines get embedded in the head. Ask your developer to shorten the time taken by the browser to run JS code and respond to user events by limiting the number of JavaScript on your website. Also, reduce the number of blocking JS files to improve LCP and speed up the rendering process.  

2. Optimize videos and defer offscreen images  

Website images take more time to load, which slows down the overall speed of the site. Offscreen picture loading also gets slowed by lazy loading. When the customers enter your business store, they won’t see any offscreen graphics. Instead, they will see a few banners at the top and some material on their viewable screen.   

The Magento 2 Convert Images to WebP helps developers automatically change to WebP image file format. Cutting-edge formats offer a significant contribution to LCP reductions too. For instance, by switching from JPEG to WebP, businesses can save up to 30% in size while maintaining the same quality.  

3. Reduce the layout shifts  

Developers must avoid extensive layout shifts because they can harm the process in which users engage with the web pages. For instance, when a visitor comes to the page, large layout changes can annoy them. Also, a page element emerges unexpectedly or travels around on the page, affecting the way users interact with the website.  

Consider revisiting or updating the code if images or other elements are hopping about the page while it loads. A seamless user experience necessitates avoiding significant layout shifts.   

4. Speed up third-party script execution  

Many Magento 2 websites have varied third-party tags and extensions, which can cause the thread to get busy and make the store unresponsive for a recorded time. Interaction latency suffers due to this entire scenario.   

The best solution is to uninstall redundant extensions from the website including JavaScript files and other potentially harmful code. Therefore, look around your site extensions, audit the code, and eliminate anything that is not required.   

Summary  

The Core Web Vitals is one of the crucial factors for Google to evaluate the entire website. Therefore, for an improved SEO, create the best user experience, specifically for LCP, FID, and CLS. You can safeguard your store’s hard-won SEO and increase its conversion rate. After all, custom codes and leveraging third-party extensions are up to your expectation and business demands.   

Are you looking for an expert Magento developer or Magento 2 development company that can assist you with these updates and upgrades? We are here to help.   

Call us today to hire Magento 2 developers who have helped global brands level-up their eCommerce game with the right strategies and marketing tactics in place.   

FAQs  

1. How to improve my Magento’s website performance?  

Here are a few things you can do:  

• Choose the best Magento hosting  
• Update the Magento version  
• Skip built-in cache  
• Use Redis or Memcached for improved Magento 2 performance optimization  
• Constantly update the indexers  
• Inspect the third-party modules  

2. How can I increase my LCP score on the Magento eCommerce site?  

Ask your Magento developer to reduce the time taken by the browser to execute JS code and response time to user interactions by limiting the number of JavaScript on the website. Reducing the number of blocking JS files will improve the LCP of your Magento store.   

3. What is Core Web Vitals Optimization?  

It provides information on your website’s performance, including page loading time, page size, and requests made. Also, it offers suggestions on how to improve your website’s performance, test the speed, and more.