The Wix community has hopefully noticed some big speed changes year over year on the platform. I’ve been doing some heavy research in learning what has been improved and the steps being taken for future improvements as well. I’ve personally been impressed with the aggressive changes in such a short timeframe.
*If anyone would like a more technical in-depth overview you can read these changes here: https://web.dev/wix/ *
MY SUGGESTION FOR BETTER SCORES:
I’ll break down my suggestion into two categories. The Wix team, and Wix partners.
Wix Team:
Us Wix partners are very new to CWV, how it functions, and every minor detail that can take place on the users end to improve loading speeds. It would be VERY helpful to have the Wix team create a checklist of best practices that us creators can do to better these scores instead of getting mad at you for things in our control. Something like the SEO Wiz would be amazing as it adds a little gamification and might entice some users to actually complete these tasks and make Wix look like an SEO powerhouse.
As for complex back-end development and changes that are only under Wix’s control, I think most of everyone has faith in the Wix team to develop the platform to beat Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.
Wix Partners
It is your job to make user-side speed optimization adjustments now and in the future. While the checklist above has not been created, that means you need to do your own research to understand what makes websites load faster that are in your control.
This is not an issue strictly for the Wix team to fix, I view it as something that needs to be collaborative between them and us.
Drop some comments and let me know what everyone thinks.
Hi Rhen.
My name is Dan Shappir, and I’m the Performance Tech Lead as Wix. First and foremost I want to thank you for your feedback - we greatly appreciate it and any suggestions you care to give us. I’m also glad that you’ve noticed the performance improvements in the Wix platform. We are indeed investing significant effort into this, across the entire company. But the reality is the personal milage may vary: one Wix user may see a significant improvement while another will see very little. Ultimately we want to improve performance for everybody, but these things do take time.
I can tell you, for example, that the percentage of Wix sites that are in Google’s CrUX report that are green (good) for all three CWV has quadrupled during the past year. This is a greater improvement than that of any other CMS.
As part of this effort, we are also reviewing and revamping all our Knowledge Base articles about about Performance. This is also related to the new Site Speed panel in the site dashboard, which links to relevant articles. (BTW this new panel was briefly highlighted in the keynote of the recent Google I/O conference.)
Finally, we are planning a webinar about things you can do to improve the performance of your own Wix websites. I hope that this webinar will be announced in a few weeks.
Thanks again!
Dan
I appreciate your in depth response. My concern is that even with the aggressive resources being allocated to speed optimization, the Wix team doesn’t have enough hours in the day by the time CWV becomes a ranking factor with full rollout in August. Can you give some context as to what your expectations to maybe end-of-year speed benchmarks?
Of course speed will likely continue to be only a minor piece of the SEO puzzle, but every competitive advantage I can get on behalf of my clients I will take
I know these conversations have been a broken record for years and I’m just as excited as you guys to end the conversation once and for all.
I think it’s worth clarifying a couple of points about Web performance in general, and how Google intends to measure it, and also about the performance efforts at Wix in particular:
I like to say that improving performance is a journey, not a destination. Theoretically our work will be done once every Wix website has good performance. But realistically that’s never going to happen, if for no other reason that it will always be possible to construct Websites with poor performance on any platform, including Wix. Moreover, as we keep releasing new features and capabilities, there will always be some combinations that have poorer performance than others. Accidental performance degradations are also a possibility, although we’ve put significant infrastructure in place in order to prevent this from happening, as much as possible.
We started this performance journey a couple of years ago, before Google even announced their intention to use page performance as a ranking signal. And it will definitely continue after August.
Another important point is that this journey is not just comprised of huge steps, but also many small and medium ones. One of the big advantages of an online service such as Wix is that we can deploy such improvements literally on a daily basis. We can improve the performance of your site without you needing to do anything about it! As a result, we are seeing constant improvements in the performance of all Wix websites, and we expect to see this trend continuing until August and beyond. This means that some Wix websites will get the SEO boot immediately, and some will get it a bit later on.
Regarding the performance ranking boost, recently at its Google I/O conference, Google provided some clarifications about how it’s going to use CWV for SEO. Here is the gist of it:
Initially, the performance SEO boost will be only for mobile. Desktop support will be added later on (no timeframe was provided)
It’s only a boost, not a degrading factor. That said, page rank could go down if its competitors get a boost and it doesn’t
Content is still king, and will always be. Content quality, and authority, have a much higher ranking impact than performance
Performance boost is calculated only from the CWV field data, as is aggregated in the Google CrUX database. Lab data, such as Google PSI, has no impact on ranking
You don’t need to get good scores for all three CWV in order to get the performance ranking boost: each metric will contribute a boost independently
You don’t need to get a good (green) score for any CWV to get a boost: you get zero boost for a poor (red) metric score. It then starts increasing gradually in the yellow zone, and plateaus when it reaches green
For more information, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWm6WNkHs90
Finally, while the ranking boost is a strong incentive for improving performance, increased engagement and reduced bounce rate are even more important, in my opinion. Having good performance has always been beneficial for a page’s success, and will continue to be so going forward.
