Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is widely used by enterprise eCommerce teams who need scale, flexibility, and integrations. It is often chosen for large catalogues, complex merchandising, and multi-market operations, which makes technical SEO consistency even more important.

This benchmarking study, by SALT, looks at how Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites perform from a technical SEO point of view, based on a sample of 4,978 Salesforce Commerce Cloud websites. The aim is to give you a clear baseline for what “normal SEO” looks like in terms of benchmarks, and what good looks like when the fundamentals are kept under control.

In this study, we focused on two areas that repeatedly affect organic performance for large eCommerce platforms. International SEO signals through hreflang, and mobile performance using PageSpeed Insights Lighthouse scores. We also included a small snapshot on keyword meta tag usage, since that still appears surprisingly often in enterprise builds.

Hreflang signals

Hreflang is where Salesforce Commerce Cloud starts to look very different to most modern web platforms. Unlike many content-led stacks, a meaningful portion of SFCC URLs in this dataset do contain hreflang, which is usually a sign of active international trading.

That is the good news. The harder part is that international SEO is rarely “set and forget”. It tends to drift over time. New page types are added, templates change, markets expand, and suddenly the hreflang setup becomes incomplete without anyone noticing.

Common hreflang issues found on SFCC international URLs

These issues are shown as a percentage of the URLs that contained hreflang.

Hreflang issue % of Issue
Missing x-default 40.98%
Missing self-reference 10.82%
Incorrect language and region codes 9.84%
Multiple entries 5.74%
Outside <head> 5.08%
Missing return links 3.28%
Inconsistent language and region return links 1.48%
Not using canonical 1.15%
Non-200 hreflang URLs 0.16%
Non-canonical return links 0.16%
Noindex return links 0.16%

The standout issue is missing x-default. This is a common gap when a site is broadly international, but does not have a clear fallback experience defined. Missing self-references and incorrect language-region codes are also frequent enough to matter, and these are exactly the kind of issues that can make international performance feel unpredictable, and can lead to negative experiences for your users.

Mobile performance benchmarks from PageSpeed Insights

Mobile performance is where this Salesforce Commerce Cloud benchmark becomes more challenging. This is not because SFCC cannot be fast, as it can. The reality is that many SFCC builds are complex by design, and that complexity tends to show up most on mobile.

PSI KPI benchmarks for mobile

KPI Value
Average performance score 55.36
Median performance score 56
Mode performance score 56
Lowest performance score 4
Highest performance score 100

Performance band breakdown

Performance band Share of scored URLs
0 to 49 32.01%
50 to 89 66.11%
90 to 100 1.88%

This spread shows something important. Even at the 75th percentile, the score is only 66. That suggests that performance improvements are not just about fixing a few outliers. For many Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites, the work is structural, and it tends to sit in shared templates, and shared scripts.

What “good SEO” looks like for Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The best Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites in 2026 are not the ones with the most features. They are the ones that stay consistent as the platform grows. They tend to have fewer surprises across page types, fewer exceptions, and fewer uncertainties with technical rules that vary by country, folder, or template.

If you want the fastest route to improvement on SFCC, the key is to focus on the things that affect large numbers of URLs at once. In enterprise eCommerce, the biggest wins rarely come from fixing individual pages. They come from improving templates and platform rules.

A sensible first priority is performance governance, as this benchmark suggests that a large portion of SFCC pages sit in a mid-range performance bracket, and very few reach the top tier. That usually happens because many sites are carrying too many scripts and too much shared overhead on every page.

The fix is not about chasing a perfect score, it is about protecting the experience for mobile users who arrive from all channels, and making sure that key commercial page types load quickly enough to support not only strong SEO metrics, but also positive user experiences that lend themselves to increased user conversion rates.

Another key issue we’ve found with SFCC websites over the years is the need to rectify legacy SEO optimisations and “box tick” practices. The keyword meta tag is a useful reminder that older practices still exist in real enterprise builds. Even if these tags do not cause direct harm, they can signal that the codebase includes other outdated assumptions.

SFCC sites that modernise well tend to simplify templates, remove unnecessary legacy features, and focus effort on the signals that matter today, such as performance, clean international targeting, and stable technical consistency.

If your site becomes easier for search engines and LLMs to interpret, and it becomes easier for internal teams to evolve without breaking performance or international visibility over time.

Not sure how your SFCC setup stacks up? Speak directly to a Salesforce Commerce Cloud SEO Consultant.

Get in touch.