The Shift is Real

We’ve all felt the sudden flush feeling when tapping to a link you wanted to visit, only to see the website page shift at the last moment, and you find yourself in an unwanted digital neighborhood. That feeling and poor experience is the genesis for cumulative load shift, which measures the amount of reflow on your site, with the aim to reduce any unintended clicks of the user.

Google’s inclusion of CLS as a Core Web Vital metric comes as a nod to the shady practice of ad-dependent sites stealing a click 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.