BigCommerce Page Lightning App
For BigCommerce
The King of Core Web Vitals – Real Web Performance Improvements
Every store owner wants their visitors to enjoy their website. A happy visitor means more sales. One key factor in visitors’ happiness is that pages are quickly usable and stable. Page Lightning focuses on that.
The Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics gathered from real users of your website that focus on user experience. You can see the data in places like the Google Search Console, the top of Page Speed Insights, or via our other app, Tag Rocket.
Page Lightning’s aim is to improve your Core Web Vitals, delivering real-world, measurable improvements in your users’ experiences.
Predictive Loading with Speculation Rules
https://bigcommerce.websiteadvantage.com.au/page-lightning/help/predictive-loading
Imagine a user clicking on a link to your product page, and it appears instantly! Not possible? It is now, with Speculation Rules. Page Lightning uses this feature to predict when a visitor is likely to click a link and starts loading it in advance.
Imagine a visitor pauses on a category page to look at a few products. Page Lightning starts to load the HTML for those products. The visitor then hovers the mouse over one of the product cards. Page Lightning then starts loading the product’s resources and executing JavaScript. The visitor then clicks, the page has already been built in the background, and bang, the page shows up instantly.
That’s just one of the tricks Page Lightning uses to predict visitors’ actions and load pages in advance.
Responsive Image Loading
https://bigcommerce.websiteadvantage.com.au/page-lightning/help/image-loading
The standard Stencil theme frequently uses responsive images. The idea is that the browser is given a selection of different-sized images to choose from, based on the size of the device it is on. That’s great, as the images for smaller devices load faster while still maintaining full quality.
However, the standard Stencil themes are flawed.
In almost every case, the responsive images are loaded using a lazy-loading JavaScript library. This delays their loading. For example, the main product image is lazy-loaded, so it takes a long time to load. That image should load as fast as possible.
Page Lightning can fix those images on the fly. Important images load as fast as possible, while low-importance images are still lazy-loaded.
Early Loading with preconnect and preload
https://bigcommerce.websiteadvantage.com.au/page-lightning/help/early-loading
Sometimes we want to speed up the loading of some resources. e.g., a script that must run before the page or widget can be built. Page Lightning can tell the browser in advance that a resource will be needed, and that it should load it straight away, and quickly.
Late Loading low importance scripts
https://bigcommerce.websiteadvantage.com.au/page-lightning/help/late-loading
This is a very advanced feature that requires editing of the theme.
When enabled, you can flag scripts to be loaded later on. These low-priority scripts can make way for the important scripts to load faster.
Reserving Space to avoid layout shifts
https://bigcommerce.websiteadvantage.com.au/page-lightning/help/reserving-space
No one wants an unstable page where the content keeps moving around as new things load. Page Lightning helps you define the page’s layout in advance, avoiding unexpected movements.
Smoother User Interactions
The built-in carousel can get in the way of the page loading and user interactions. Here is how to change the carousel to minimise its impact.