Site Speed Standard:
Core Web Vital Focus
This focus report benchmarks Core Web Vital performance across more than 250 leading eCommerce sites.
Core Web Vitals are a set of website performance metrics developed by Google that highlight aspects of web page development that impact user experience, such as page loading, interactivity, and visual stability. A site’s Core Web Vital performance is considered by Google when ranking pages for organic search. The three Core Web Vitals are First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Find out more about Core Web Vitals.
First Input Delay, or FID, measures the impact that background tasks have on delaying the user’s first action either clicking a button or typing a character.
Across the three primary eCommerce pages – home page, category pages, and product detail pages – eCommerce sites are overwhelmingly beating the Google benchmark for First Input Delay.
Compliance varies slightly by device; mobile exceeds the benchmark on PDPs for 81% of sites, while 95% of sites beat Google’s measure of good on computer screens.
With near unanimous compliance across devices, brands and retailers can expect to be in the green, and possibly even relegate First Input Delay monitoring to a secondary metric.
With near unanimous compliance across devices, brands and retailers can expect to be in the green, and possibly even relegate First Input Delay monitoring to a secondary metric.
Google sets the ‘good’ bar at 100 milliseconds for First Input Delay. Across the three primary pages, each device’s average falls well within this mark. Mobile’s first input delays hover near 70 milliseconds, while their larger screen counterparts halve (or better) that value.
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Register NowCumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, measures the amount of reflow on your site, with the aim to reduce any unintended clicks of the user.
The inclusion of cumulative layout shift as a Core Web Vital metric comes is a nod to the shady practice of ad-dependent sites stealing a click on an ad by inconveniently shifting to just where the user was aiming to engage with page content.
eCommerce sites – in particular on mobile - have struggled to draw a stable page for shoppers. The issue is most clear on product detail pages and category pages, where under 17% and 12% of sites are in compliance with the benchmark.
Unsurprisingly, full screen computers perform better, though product detail pages and category pages are compliant on less than 1/3rd of all sites.
CLS is a strict standard – arguably disconnected from the dynamic reality of eCommerce category and product pages. Those struggling to meet the benchmark are not alone – most sites fall far short of the ‘good’ benchmark.
The shift is real. The average shift on a mobile category page is nearly 50% - meaning that nearly half of the page shifts right before a shopper’s eyes. Mobile PDPs also create a shifty experience, with more than a third of a page shifting. Home pages, while known for having some of the most speed violations, shift least of the three primary ecommerce pages.
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Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, is a site performance metric that measures how long it takes for the largest item in the viewport to load.
LCP may be the most critical and discerning of CWV standards to meet. Largest Contentful Paint compliance varies by page type. Most home pages – about 90% – are out of compliance, while about 85% of product detail pages also miss the benchmark. The nature of these pages – filled with hero images and content – certainly contribute to the longer paint time.
Category pages, however, are far more compliant, with a majority of sites either meeting the ‘good’ or ‘needs improvement’ benchmark.
Focusing on load - and optimizing to it - is critical to serving a shopper’s needs. This applies to optimizing conversion rate, too, as a one second improvement in page load time helps boost conversion by 6%.
eCommerce needs improvement across the shopper journey. The diagnosis is clear and consistent across the average largest contentful paint. While category pages slightly outperform the other primary pages, each page on both key devices is firmly ensconced in the ‘needs improvement’ category.
Here’s how to diagnose and improve performance for largest contentful paint.
Good things don’t come to brands that make shoppers wait. When page load times stretch beyond 6 seconds, 2 out of 3 shoppers bounce. Are you keeping your shoppers waiting? See how you stack up against the Site Speed Standard.
Learn MoreThroughout the Core Web Vitals analysis, we focus attention on the most trafficked devices – mobile and computer. Together, these devices account for 97% of all page views during the last two quarterly periods. Shoppers have continued to increase their consumption on mobile, with mobile page view share rising about 5 percentage points over the past 5 quarters, taking share primarily from computers.
The shopper journey is highly concentrated onto three primary pages; home page, product detail pages, and category pages. Together, these three page types account for 83% of all page views. This concentration has remained consistent year-over-year. Landing pages saw the largest share gains over the past year, likely driven by increased segmentation from marketing campaigns.
The Core Web Vital Focus Report is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of eCommerce Core Web Vital performance metrics. The primary measures used, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Largest Contentful Paint, are set forth by Google as guiding metrics for optimal search performance.
The metrics expressed in this report are captured from the Chrome User Experience Report dataset, ChrUx, and represent the 75th percentile of observations. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure brand, retailer, and shopper anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.
The Core Web Vital Focus Report is a companion to the Site Speed Standard.
To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have transacted throughout the entire analysis period, in this case March 2021 through March 2022. For current period analyses, the analysis period is March 2022. The median monthly page view for the middle 50% of the analysis set is greater than 1 million, with an interquartile range between approximately 300K and 3M. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.
Data footnotes are noted throughout the report to provide additional clarity on analysis.
The Core Web Vital Focus Report is not directly indicative of the operational performance of Yottaa or its reported financial metrics. The performance metrics shared within this report are calculated based on the analysis set, and should not be taken as a guarantee of site performance.
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