The 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 UK ecommerce domains across four analyzed Industries (Electronics & Media, Fashion, Food & Personal Care, Toys, Hobbies, DIY), with about 29 unique domain groups analyzed per industry. In total, 185,000 URLs with an equal share of desktop and mobile pages were included in the study.

The results clearly show that the majority of UK companies in the ecommerce sector are not ready for Google’s switch. It found, 0% of crawled websites reached a ‘good’ performance score on mobile devices, compared to 5.36% on desktop. What’s more, 93.75% of mobile sites received a ‘poor’ score, while only 33.93% of desktop sites scored this low.

Fashion industry is most out of season

Whilst the study showed wide-reaching issues across all ecommerce websites, the Fashion segment scored much lower across several metrics:

• For Overall Performance Scores, Fashion sites ranked the lowest with an average of 18/100, while Food sites scored 24/100, Electronics 25/100, and Toys 26/100.
• Fashion websites recorded the longest Total Blocking Times on mobile at 11.4 seconds, compared to only 5.7 seconds in the Electronics segment.
• Measuring mobile load times for Largest Contentful Paint, Fashion sites took the longest at 11.1 seconds, compared to 8.5 seconds for Toys & Hobbies.

In the bigger picture, Largest Contentful Paint was the worst-performing metric out of the three web vitals, with 91.96% of analyzed domains earning a ‘poor’ score for LCP on mobile. This is no surprise, considering the high amount of heavy image assets and ad content that ecommerce websites — and fashion in particular — need to balance. However, 67% of these same websites reached a ‘good’ LCP score on desktop, indicating that the focus on website development and testing is likely still too strongly desktop-focussed.

"A good search performance is vital for eCommerce companies, so it’s quite surprising to see how poor the Core Web Vitals scores are in this sector," said Ryte Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist Marcus Tandler. "There are a lot of quick wins that can be achieved, but it’s key that companies act quickly to be well prepared for Google’s new push towards a better user experience" Tandler added.

To get a complete picture of the data and results, download the full “Website User Experience: The UK Ecommerce Sector is Unprepared for Google’s Core Web Vitals” industry study here.