2024 Digital Retail Index

The Digital Retail Index - 2024 Edition

Returning for its 3rd year, the Digital Retail Index began in 2022 and has since evolved into becoming the source of truth for digital retailers wishing to compare their website against their competitors.

Compiled by Remarkable Commerce, the UK's most flexible commerce platform, the Digital Retail Index uses Google's Lighthouse tool to gauge web performance, setting a standard for eCommerce storefronts nationwide. Google Lighthouse conducts five key audits: Performance and Speed, UX Best Practices, Accessibility, SEO configuration, and PWA enablement.

Performance Audit

This audit reviews several metrics focused specifically on site speed, these metrics include largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift and many others.

Best Practices Audit

Ensuring your site aligns with general UK best practices, like ensuring your site is secure, avoids using depreciated technology and looks good to users.

Accessibility Audit

Ensuring a storefront has SEO implemented is critical to a retailers capabilities, this audit checks that sites can be crawled effectively and efficiently by search engines.

SEO Audit

This audit reviews several metrics focused specifically on site speed, these metrics include largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift and many others.

PWA Audit

This audit checks that a storefront is PWA friendly and what levels of PWA-enabling functionality have been implemented, such as offline caching and header theme styling.

Why the Index matters:

Even a slight deterioration in performance can hit sales and brand loyalty, particularly during busy sales periods like Black Friday and Christmas. Investment in SEO is non-negotiable for most businesses today - but eCommerce firms, in particular, will simply slide into obsolescence if they don't maintain a strong web presence.

Achieving a high (or top) position in Google's search results depends on multiple factors and website performance is critical. Sites with fast loading speeds, relevant content and good UX will outrank those that don't, so retailers that want to stay ahead need to continually measure performance using Google's Lighthouse tool and make technical improvements to support SEO.

Final thoughts:

The pandemic fuelled a flurry of online sales activity over the last few years and those who'd invested in a well-performing and scalable website were in a prime position to benefit from this demand. Shopper habits have now changed for good, shifting even further towards eCommerce, and retailers have to be ready for surges during peak periods.

Given the technical capabilities of some of the biggest eCommerce companies, most notably Amazon, managing website performance to the standard required can feel daunting. However, as the Digital Retail Index indicates, not every retailer that operates online comes from an eCommerce background, nor do they work on a global scale.

A cloud-native store front, with easy-to-use integrations, means you can optimise performance and scale up as demand grows.

You can also lean on your platform provider for the technical skills and expertise you might not have within your own team. Our developers and engineers deliver and optimise our B2C eCommerce platform so you see real improvements in website performance - the driver for visibility, web traffic, conversions and sales.

Methodology:

The 2024 Digital Retail Index assessed 728 retailers in total. All were ranked based on five core audits, using Google Lighthouse to create an unbiased view on the top UK eCommerce sites. The five metrics are performance and speed, progressive web app validation, accessibility, best practices and SEO. Note: Due to changes in Google Lighthouse tests and scoring, the total available score for each retailer was '500' in 2024 and 2023, compared with '400' for 2022.

A lot of the variability in your overall Performance score and metric values is not due to Lighthouse. When your Performance score fluctuates it's usually because of changes in underlying conditions. Common reasons include:

• A/B tests or changes in ads being served
• Internet traffic routing changes
• Testing on different devices, such as a high-performance desktop and a low-performance laptop
• Browser extensions that inject JavaScript and add/modify network requests