CLS Impacting our SEO

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I found a similar issue that Discourse said was fixed but I think we’re experiencing the same problem: ?page=n URLs have high CLS hence bad SEO

We have an issue: On September 3rd, 2024, our Search Console core web vitals started giving us many poor-performance URLs because of CLS of > .25

We went from 0 to 5,179 in a day.

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It seems like these are only for URLs that have a “?page=X” in the query string. Here is an example: Factor Meals, anyone done them? Looking at the first shipment, and wow - #20 by robcow - Nutrition - TrainerRoad

Keen to get this fixed, thanks!

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Thanks for the report @npearson99. I can reproduce the problem, and we’ll work on getting a fix ASAP.

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We see the same sudden increase in CLS failures for meta.discourse.org, starting 9th November. Digging in, it seems to be related to the way we animate the background-color of posts when you navigate into a topic. That behaviour has been the same for 5+ years, so that suggests to me that this is a change to google/chrome’s measurement of CLS, rather than a change on the Discourse side.

We’ve decided to drop the animation in question. That should improve navigation performance on lower-spec devices, as well as resolve the CLS issue.

That change will land on Meta imminently, and I’ll get it queued up for your site as well @npearson99.

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Wow, you’re the best! Thank you!

Can you drop a message here when it’s live, please? I’d like to confirm that we go under the .25 on Search Console when it’s live.

Edit: It looks like it’s live; I don’t see the animation anymore. I think Google just hasn’t updated the page’s score yet. I’ll continue to monitor.

Thanks!

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