Salesforce Commerce Cloud: an asset for your PageSpeed ​​score?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an Ecommerce solution known for its power and many features, which you may already be using, or to which you plan to migrate. If you are wondering about the performance of this CMS, we have some information that will interest you!

As you probably know, loading speed is crucial for user experience, it has an impact on your conversion rates, and it is an SEO criterion since Google’s Page Experience update .

The famous search engine provides the PageSpeed ​​Insights tool that offers a score for evaluating the performance of web pages, and we decided to look at those of Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC). Let’s dissect together the speed of pages on this CMS trusted by more than 150,000 companies (and more than 805 million unique visitors each month), and dig into the business impacts. We will see that you can push your loading speed even further with this renowned CMS.

PageSpeed ​​Insights Scores for Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) Ecommerce Sites

Let’s start with some methodological elements: we evaluated the loading speed of 30 of the most visited e-commerce sites in France in the summer of 2021, on mobile and desktop , using PageSpeed ​​Insights.

As a reminder, Google considers that:

• from 0 to 49: a web page is slow,
• from 50 to 89: a web page is moderately fast,
• from 90 to 100: a web page is fast.

The score is calculated based on 6 metrics related to web performance, and Core Web Vitals account for 70% of the total score (the metrics that Google has integrated into its algorithm to evaluate the quality of the user experience).

So what about the performance of Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites? Let’s not keep you in suspense any longer, the results of our study reveal that:

• less than 10% of sites are fast on desktop according to PageSpeed,
• None of the sites are fast on mobile , and 93.4% are even considered slow.

Across all pages tested, the average PageSpeed ​​scores are:

• 65 on desktop (moderately fast according to PageSpeed),
• 21 on mobile (slow according to PageSpeed).

To understand how the tested e-commerce site pages compare to each other in terms of performance, here is the detailed ranking and PageSpeed ​​scores of the top 20:

The diagnosis is clear: despite the power of this CMS, most Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites need optimizations to obtain a good PageSpeed ​​Insights score !

Let’s continue our investigation…

As we mentioned, this score is calculated, among other things, from the Core Web Vitals metrics. Google has provided thresholds for each of them:

• The Largest Contentful Paint ( LCP ) should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load. This metric indicates when the largest element in terms of size appears in the browser.
• The First Input Delay ( FID ) should remain below 100 milliseconds . This metric measures the time between the moment a user first interacts with a page and the moment the browser is able to respond to that interaction. It is important to know that to calculate the PageSpeed ​​score, Google relies on a metric that approximates the FID: the Total Blocking Time (TBT, i.e. the accumulation of periods during which the browser cannot respond to interactions while a page is loading). Improvements to the TBT generally improve the FID.
• The Cumulative Layout Shift ( CLS ) should remain below 0.1 . This score evaluates the visual stability of a page.

So what about SFCC sites?

Core Web Vitals on Salesforce Commerce Cloud Sites

Our tests revealed that the page speed of SFCC Ecommerce sites can be improved:

• the average LCP is 2.79 seconds on mobile and 3.6 seconds on desktop (in the range considered average by PageSpeed);
• the average FID is 310 ms on mobile and 340 on desktop (in the red for both devices );
• the average CLS is 0.35 on mobile and 0.17 on desktop (i.e. above the threshold for Google to consider a page as visually stable enough to ensure a good user experience).

NB: Generally speaking, whatever your CMS, you should know that it does not have the power to make your site “fast” . Indeed, your site is alive, the CMS does not remain empty, and it is everything that you are going to integrate into it (content, images, features, advertising, tracking , A/B testing , etc.) that adds value, but also weight to your web pages. To optimize your time, resources and budget, consider automating the optimization of your frontend (this is the role of our SaaS solution !).