Ryte industry study reveals the ecommerce sector is not ready for the impact of Google’s Core Web Vitals on search ranking

Ryte, the award-winning website quality management company, today published results from a new industry study titled “Next-level User Experience: How prepared is ecommerce for Google’s Core Web Vitals?” The study crawled over 200,000 URLs across the top 50 ecommerce domains in the DACH region to examine the impact of a new set of website parameters called Core Web Vitals that will factor as ranking signals starting in May 2021.
With the introduction of Core Web Vitals, the world of search ranking is headed for a major disruption in 2021. Google is siding with web users by placing a stronger emphasis on user experience and will prioritize sites that deliver accordingly.
As a result, Ryte’s used its website crawling software and in-house data analysis expertise to create a study with the purpose of understanding the impact that the introduction of Core Web Vitals will have on the ecommerce sector.

The verdict? The rise of Core Web Vitals as ranking signals will catch major players in the ecommerce space unprepared. This is the clear conclusion of Ryte’s industry study of web domains operated by the largest online retailers across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Ryte’s study measured website performance against the key metrics in Google’s Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), specifically for mobile sites. It selected domains from the Top 50 ecommerce domains across four analyzed Industries (Electronics & Media, Fashion, Food & Personal Care, Toys, Hobbies, DIY), with about 29 domains analyzed per industry. In total, 207,669 URLs with an equal share of desktop and mobile pages were considered for the study.

The study found the following:

• Only 0.9% of mobile sites achieved a “good” Website Performance score

• 87% of analyzed domains received ‘poor’ scores for mobile Largest Contentful Paint

• Only 9% of desktop sites need to improve Largest Contentful Paint scores

• 91% of mobile sites achieved poor scores for interactivity (First Input Delay)

• 36% of analyzed websites scored poorly in terms of stability on mobile (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Performance on mobile emerged as the biggest pain point in the study with only 0.9% of mobile sites achieving a “good” Website Performance score, a score that is an agglomeration of all Core Web Vital scores.
“In an industry we usually consider at the forefront of website and SEO developments, we were surprised to see our data point at such wide-reaching Core Web Vitals related issues. The good news is that a lot of these issues can be identified and fixed relatively quickly,” said Ryte Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist Marcus Tandler.
The data showed that large images are the main culprit for the low scores on mobile. The Ryte study concluded that brands may be neglecting mobile when auditing or choosing only to analyze desktop versions of their website.
To get a complete picture of the data and results, download the full “Next-level User Experience: How prepared is ecommerce for Google’s Core Web Vitals?” industry study here.

About Ryte

Ryte is an award-winning SaaS company headquartered in Munich, Germany and one of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe. Ryte helps businesses and agencies optimize their website user experience with its state-of-the-art software products.

The Ryte Suite, loved by more than one million digital marketers and agencies worldwide, provides users with the 3 essential tools needed to create a more sustainable website: Website Success, Content Success, and Search Success. BotLogs is an innovative alternative to log file analysis, giving SEOs a solution for easy, daily, real-time bot analysis.

Some of the world’s most renowned companies, like Daimler, Allianz, and Sixt, trust in the Ryte technology to reach their website’s full potential. For more information, visit ryte.com.