Shopify now has a new app that displays a site’s Google Web Vitals score. Improving the scores may help a site perform better. In 2021 the Web Vitals scores will become ranking factors.
What is the Shopify Web Vitals App?
The app provides Shopify shop merchants the ability to check their Web Vitals score and compare them to the competition.
The app was created by Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik), Director of Developer Relations at Google.
Ilya announced it on Twitter:
“Run a Shopify store and curious how it performs against the Core Web Vitals recommendations for LCP, FID, and CLS? Bonus, how it stack up against the competition?”
What is Web Vitals?
Web Vitals is comprised of three metrics that together report on the user experience of site visitors.
Scoring high on the Web Vitals metrics is a sign that a page downloads quickly and is usable to site visitors.
Those performance benchmarks have been associated with higher sales and contribute to positive user experiences on a website.
Web Vitals consist of three metrics:
- Cumulative Layout Shift
- Largest Contentful Paint
- First Input Delay
Cumulative Layout Shift
This measures the propensity of the elements on a web page to shift around as the web page downloads. A web page is not usable until the visible page elements like buttons, forms, text and images have downloaded and don’t move.
Less waiting for a page to become usable is associated with a better user experience and higher sales.
Largest Contentful Paint
Largest Contentful Paint measures the download speed of the main web page elements that are visible to a site visitor. This doesn’t measure if the page can be interacted with.
It’s just a metric that measures how long a site visitor has to wait until they can actually see the web page content.
Site visitors who have to wait a long time, particularly on a mobile device, will tend to bounce away from a site and go look for another site to buy from.
First Input Delay
FID measures how much time it takes for a web page to respond after a user interacts with it.
Sometimes there can be web page elements that download in the background that can stop a user from interacting with a web page.
For example, if a web page contains scripts that are necessary for a form to work, the site visitor has to wait until that script downloads before they are able to interact with it.
Sometimes there are scripts, videos or other page elements that are downloading in the background that create a blocking effect that prevents a user from clicking a navigation button or scrolling down to a lower part of a page, preventing a user from interacting with it.
Shopify Web Vitals App is Convenient
The app is displayed within a Shopify merchant’s dashboard.
According to the Shopify app page:
“Embedded report on your storefront & your competition
This app provides a built-in report into how real-world Google Chrome users experience your Shopify-powered storefront, as captured by the Chrome UX Report, and enables you to benchmark your site against a custom list of competitors with respect to each of the vital metrics…”
Shopify Web Vitals App
The Shopify Web Vitals app brings sophisticated web metrics to all Shopify merchants. The app will help merchants improve sales and user experience. In 2021 it will also help them rank better in Google.
Read the Shopify App Page
Core Web Vitals Dashboard
https://apps.shopify.com/vitals-1
