eCommerce Business? Leverage on Core Web Vitals Update 2021

For most people, the summer season is all about good vibes, beaches, ice cream, and happy hours. But this time, there is one more reason that can be added to the to-do list. It’s the new Google Core Web Vitals Update arriving with full force in August 2021 and has got a lot to help businesses stay on the top of the search engine result page.

So, what’s the core focus of this update, and how can the eCommerce establishments make the best use out of it?

Let’s explore.

Google Core Update for August 2021: Helicopter View

The upcoming update from Google is set on a mission to improve the page experience metrics of the websites. For those who are unaware, the page experience consists of signals that measure how fast and easy it is for the users to engage with the website.

The three core web vitals metrics as illustrated below form an important part of these signals and help webmasters evaluate the page experience quality web pages:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): LCP evaluates the time consumed by the largest piece of content to populate on the webpage. The LCP signal of a website is good if the largest content consumes less than 2.5 seconds to display on the screen.
• FID (First Input Delay): FID evaluates the time consumed by the web page to interact with the user’s request. The FID signal of a website is good if the response time is less than 100 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): CLS evaluates the unexpected movements of a webpage’s content like text, images, video, CTA buttons, etc. The CLS signal of a website is good if the score is less than 0.1.

Apart from the core web vitals, four more search signals evaluate the page experience of a web page:

• Mobile-friendliness: The upcoming update will favour the mobile search ranking of web pages that are easily accessible on mobile devices.
• Safe Browsing: Web pages providing a list of web resources that contain malware and phishing content to safeguard users will have a preference over the search engine result pages.
• HTTPS: Web pages with stronger HTTPS encryption will have a significant advantage in searching as Google intends to promote secure connections.
• Intrusive Interstitial: Web pages with less or no interference from the interstitials that disturbs the UX will have a better probability of securing a good spot on the search engine result pages.

There are hundreds of ranking signals from Google, but the page experience signal is a bit special because it helps the users to have a better online interaction with the queries requested on the search engine.

That’s why website owners, digital marketers, and web developers need to understand these page experience signals and design a roadmap recognizing the needs of the update.

Why Upcoming Google Core Update Matters?

E-Commerce managers need to understand the theory behind page experience signals and incorporate relevant changes on the web pages’ architecture to prevent the URL from experiencing a dropped ranking.

If necessary actions are not enforced to optimize the page experience as per the Google Core Update, then it will have a downside impact on the traffic which will create a domino effect as outlined below:

• Loss of trust among the audience
• Drop off in the user engagement
• Drop off in the organic ranking
• Dent in the brand value of the business

No eCommerce manager would like to face the nightmare of fixing a dent in the brand value of a business, making of which might have taken significant time and investments.

Why eCommerce Businesses Needs to Optimize for Google Core Update 2021

It has been observed that many eCommerce website’s main focus has been on maximizing sales without realizing that users expect a good experience while browsing for the products to buy. For example, If the checkout process is slow or unresponsive, then the sales will eventually drop.

In an average eCommerce site, multiple third party tools, functions and features are included which may increase the page load time and result in a lesser user experience:

• Generally heavy pages
• Use of tracking scripts
• Use of chatbots, recommendation engines etc.
• Integration of other third-party features

ImageEngine: The Next Generation Solution Adapting to the Google Core Update

There might be good reasons for using all the third party tools and functions. A chatbot for example may increase cart size, but it also increases bounce rate because it adds to the page load time.

A performance budget may be needed.

ImageEngine will justify the use of third party tools and functions that increases load time by reducing the load time of images and at the same time improving the user experience. This way ImageEngine will make more room in the performance budget.

To make it easy to make more room on the performance budget, the carefully designed plugins from ImageEngine made for different eCommerce CMS platforms can help.

The plugins are easy to integrate and help to optimize images into the next generation formats that consume less space and have great quality.

ImageEngine integration guides for different eCommerce CMS plugins are very easy to understand:

• Drupal Integration Guide
• BigCommerce Integration Guide
• Magento Integration Guide

There are several reasons to choose the ImageEngine plugin for optimizing images as outlined below:

• The plugins can optimize images up to 80% into the next generation formats like WebP, AVIF, JPEG2000, etc for faster loading of web pages.
• The plugins can also serve content other than images like CSS, JavaScript, Fonts, etc.
• The plugins are easy to install and the configuration can also be tested before it is enabled.
• The plugins deliver images via a global CDN network for enhanced user experience.
• The plugins can automatically resize image dimensions and perform re-encoding.
• Superior image quality and compression for mobile web browsing

Conclusion

The upcoming Google Core Update was originally planned to be released around May 2021 but has been postponed to have a complete rollout in phases beginning from mid-June to August. It is done so that the webmaster can make certain arrangements to prepare themselves better before the update is live. Google said it, “hopes that this adjusted roll-out schedule will help you continue to make refinements to your website with page experience in mind.”

The upcoming update is important as it is meant for improving the user experience so that the websites can have a better conversion rate and improved reach. ImageEngine will help make the most out of the Google update by generally making the user experience better; faster-loading pages and better-looking images. Moreover, ImageEngine will pave the way for implementing and maintaining a performance budget with room for critical, but slow, components to any eCommerce website.