Hey All,
I have a fairly complex issue that I think a lot of users may be experiencing. I run several sites with x and x pro. These vary in size and pages with the largest being a few thousand that include several images per page as well as use essential grid. Over the last few months the sites have performed admirably well and we’ve achieved an SEO score that usually ranges anywhere from 95-100 when we look at web.dev/measure. Recently I began seeing massive traffic decreases and notifications of both CLS and LCP issues in google search console. These stand for Cumulative Layout Shift and Largest Contentful paint.
I’ve reviewed the issue extensively over the last week. What has driven me crazy about this is that my lighter sites of around 10 pages with no essential grid and a much lighter image load haven’t failed these tests. In fact they’re growing in google organic traffic steadily while my larger sites suffer from an obvious metric penalty. I have QA’d the issue as well. I disabled essential grid on our largest site and it did help our score minimally but did not bring the metrics up to where I had hoped they’d be when matched with our other sites. You can see the comparison between the two here.
What I have come up with as a conclusion here is that we’re having a problem with lazy load reflow. I’m not a hardcore dev and am much more of an SEO guy. Is there any way to fix this with CSS code in our unique theme? You can find more about the issue here at this link.
Any help you can provide would be great. I am hesitant to post the specific sites I’m having issues with because of the fact that they cover adult content. They are SFW in nature and have no nudity on them but I still want to be conscious of the forum here. If you need access to the URL’s so you can see how these sites are doing on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ I can provide them upon request.