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case study Fasterize
This global leader in cosmetics operates in a fiercely competitive market and aims to consolidate its position by offering its customers a high-performance website and optimal user experience. The brand has chosen to include its website speeds in its strategy, as it understands the drawbacks of a slow website (81% of French web users would think twice before buying from a slow site).
Although the situation is gradually evolving, very few marketing departments are aware of the benefits of webperf. By taking this project on board, this industry leader aims to ensure that its marketing campaigns achieve the best possible conversion rates and that its website can handle heavy loads during traffic peaks.

To alleviate the workload of its technical staff, this leading company chose to outsource this project to Fasterize, bearing in mind that developing webperf optimizations requires expertise and is time-consuming in both implementation and maintenance.

3 objectives

  • technical: to ensure a high-performance website
  • brand-related: to enhance the brand image through performance
  • and, obviously, business-related: to boost conversion rates

7 KPIs (key performance indicators)

To evaluate the project's success and determine whether it should be rolled out globally, 7 KPIs were monitored.

2 technical KPIs...
  • Start Render: time taken for the web page to change from a blank screen to displaying its first elements
  • Speed Index: the speed at which above-the-fold content is displayed to the user

… and 5 business KPIs
  • desktop conversion rate
  • average shopping cart value
  • number of pageviews per session
  • average session time
  • bounce rate

4 implementation phases

  1. Acceptance testing of the optimized site After a few checks and adjustments, the online store’s configuration was fine-tuned to achieve the best possible performances. (Acceptance testing is usually carried out on a test domain name to avoid disrupting the live website.)

  2. Setting up a pilot website online Once the technical aspects were validated, an initial pilot website was set up online to measure the business impact of these new optimizations. The first website that the company optimized was the brand’s US store. A/B testing was carried out over an 8-week period. This time was needed to stabilize the results. This enabled us to verify that the A/B testing was reliable and that the results fully correlated with the website’s optimization.

  3. Analyzing results and ROI The marketing teams analyzed all the project’s data and ROI to determine the viability of implementing this system globally.

  4. Rolling out the solution globally ROI was confirmed. As a result, the solution was maintained on the US website, and has been rolled out to the Canadian, French, German and Chinese sites.

Some results data

Technical measurements were performed on 3 key web pages attracting the majority of traffic. Business measurements were also performed during A/B testing and therefore cover all users of the pilot website.
case study fasterize
In terms of technical KPIs, Start Render improved by 19% and Speed Index by 15%.

In terms of business KPIs:
  • the desktop conversion rate increased by 16%,
  • the average shopping cart value rose by 1.7%,
  • the number of pageviews per session increased by 3.8%,
  • the average session time rose by 6%,
  • the bounce rate decreased by 3.4%.
From a sales and marketing viewpoint, this project paid off fully within just a few weeks, and led to an improvement in all the KPIs regularly monitored by the marketing department.
Now that their websites have been optimized, the marketing teams are no longer concerned about website speeds and can focus fully on their promotional campaigns.

How about you? Where do you stand today? Do you really know how fast your website is?
And whether it could be improved?