Today we are releasing an improvement to how we load eCommerce pages on the platform. This should have a long term impact on how well store pages are indexed & discovered by other crawlers & tools.
As many of our customers know, we have deep integration with an eCommerce tool called Ecwid. In the past, we have relied on the Ecwid store Javascript embed to load & display each page of the store. Pages such as product pages & categories would load after the page loaded & require all javascript to execute before the content would be displayed.
People who follow the SEO industry closely know that Google has a hard time rendering pages that fully rely on Javascript to display content. Google has been trying to educate the community on how to render and display content so that Google is best able to crawl and index the content. Based on this education and our own experience with how well our store content on our website was indexed, we listened to this.
With this new release, we will now server-side render the content of our eCommerce stores for the product, home and category pages of the store. This means that when a crawler (such as the Google or Facebook bot) visits the website, they will see the full HTML & content of the page. In the past, we would not have all the content within the HTML for each store page.
The benefit of this is many:
- Google will find and index store pages much faster. In the past, store pages took a long time to become indexed, because Google had to go into a more lengthy index process of rendering the javascript from the store.
- Google will now find Schema data within the store. This means that they will have solid data about the price, description, SKU and more at their fingertips to populate search results better.
- Below is an example from Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool that shows them identifying schema within the product page of an eCommerce Store.
- Social websites will now find the correct Open Graph image to display when a store webpage is shared on a social website.
We hope with this change we will see continued success with our eCommerce customers and show that we are committed to providing the best platform for agencies to scale their business.