What Is CLS and How Does It Impact Your Multifamily Website?

Are you noticing your website shifts when it loads?

Are potential leads complaining that your site is difficult to navigate and view?

Do residents avoid using your site because they find it sluggish and irritating?

You probably have an issue with your CLS, which could make or break the user experience.

User experience is a big deal, with sobering statistics:

👉 89% of people will switch to a competitor's website after a poor UX.

👉 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.

👉 79% of people will immediately look for another site if they don't like what they see on the first one.

(Source)

When lead capture and conversion are everything, you need to make sure your website offers the best experience possible.

Here’s a look at why CLS is important and what to do about it to avoid losing leads and diminishing your brand.

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What Is CLS and Why Does It Matter?

CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift,  measures how much your website layout unexpectedly shifts when users are viewing your webpage.

Your website’s CLS is also part of your Core Vital Metrics, which are part of how Google measures whether or not you're providing a good search experience and ranks your site.

Let’s say potential residents visit your site and notice that the text font is suddenly changing, images are loading too slowly, or the pop-up to join your email list is shifting the page content.

They're experiencing a Cumulative Layout Shift.

(Source)

A small amount of CLS issues may not deter visitors, but even slight shifts can create a negative impression of your site and drag down and impact your Core Web Vitals.

The results?

Tip 💡: You could end up ranking below your competitors in a Google search result or apartment hunters may find your site annoying to use.

How Do You Know If Your CLS Score Is Good or Bad?

Google doesn’t keep your CLS score a secret and will categorize it accordingly:

👉 “Good” CLS: Below 0.10

👉 “Needs Improvement” CLS: Between 0.10 and 0.25

👉 “Poor” CLS: Above 0.25

Here’s an example of what your CLS might look like:

(Source)

Tip💡: As a rule of thumb, sites should have a CLS of 0.1 or less for at least 75% of page visits.

Why Your Site Has Poor CLS

Layout shifts are normal and can happen for a variety of reasons, but some of the most common issues with your website shifting include:

1. Web fonts aren't styled correctly or don’t adhere to good website standards
2. Images that were not sized correctly with specific dimensions
3. Ads and iframes that don't have dimensions
4. Dynamically injected content (which could be ads, embeds, and iframes) without dimensions

CLS issues can happen anywhere on your site, but it’s common to see them at the top of a website due to an ad or injecting some kind of content that forces the website to shift.

You don’t need to obsess over every single CLS issue, but they’re straightforward to fix and can make a difference in how leads engage with your website—or whether they leave altogether.

Of course, if your multifamily business is in a tight rental market, you may be able to get away with some website issues.

But you risk establishing yourself as a business that doesn’t care about its brand or professional appearance.

Once you’ve earned that reputation, it’s difficult to change public perception in the long run.

How to Identify Your Website’s CLS Issues

CLS issues aren’t hard to detect; you can usually just see them happening in real time.

However, if you have a ton of website pages to go through, it may be less obvious.

You can dig into the problems with your site by turning to your Google Search Console:

✅ Click on your Core Web Vitals within your Google Search Console.

✅ Use PageSpeed Insights to copy and paste in your URL and run a report.

✅ Load the pages on the question page and see if anything moves around or changes during the initial load.

Now that you have an idea of what’s going on with your website, you can get to work fixing some of the errors.

1. Read the description of the specific error type within the Google Search Console.
2. Click into an issue and inspect an example page.
3. Fix the error. (In most cases, you can simply resize your images, choose a more standard web font like Arial, and remove pop-ups and ads to get your website under control.)
4. Request validation by clicking Validate Fix on the details page.

If you're not a tech person at all, a team member or web developer can take a look to resolve your CLS issues.

Tip 💡: In most cases, you can make progress by simply resizing your images, choosing a standard web font like Arial, and removing pop-ups and ads to get your website under control.

Your web developer may also need to dig into your CSS and add some space around the width and height attributes of images, videos, and other website elements to smooth things out.

It may sound like technical overload, but CSS fixes usually take minutes and shouldn't derail your marketing efforts or ability to attract and convert the leads you want.

Remember, the real goal of CLS is to provide a top-notch user experience to attract, engage, and convert more leads.

If you don’t care about your website’s impact on your brand, then why would anyone else take your business seriously?

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