Loading speed and user experience are inseparable. The performance of your pages is an essential lever to keep your users engaged and facilitate their journey, until the purchase.
The sites we present in this article have understood this well: metrics in the green, optimized pages and multiple gains ( SEO , business, etc.).
To assess their performance, we relied on key metrics:
- Time to first byte or TTFB measures the time it takes for the web server to return the first response after receiving a request.
- the start render : this is the moment when the page stops being white. At this moment, the first image or visual element appears on the page.
- Speed Index : This metric measures the perceived speed of the page, it is very important for UX. It provides information on the display speed of the area located above the waterline of a web page (also called viewport), taking into account the progressiveness of the display of the content and the different elements. In short, the Speed Index measures what the user sees, and not what the browser technically does.
- CLS , one of the Core Web Vitals : it measures the visual stability of the page. It evaluates the amount of visual changes that occur during page loading, such as images that jump or ads that load late.
- and the LCP , also a Core Web Vital: it measures the time needed for the largest visual element of the page (image, text, video, etc.) to be loaded and displayed.
The FID is not presented in this article, as all data collected are lab data.
Now discover our analysis of the sites with very good performances!
King Jouet optimizes its web performance and dominates the ranking
Who are they?
You know them: King Jouet is a company dedicated to selling children’s toys, in stores and online. The most critical period is the end of the year: between Black Friday and Christmas, King-jouet.com achieves the same turnover as the month of January every day! During this period, the speed of the site must be at its best, despite the traffic peaks!
The starting point of the company
Before entrusting its webperf projects to Fasterize, King Jouet had a CDN . In addition, the teams closely monitored its third parties . To improve loading times, they had also considered switching to AMP .
Ultimately, the teams turned to Fasterize, which addresses both CDN and Front-End Optimization (FEO) needs.
King Jouet’s web performance objectives
The King Jouet teams had several ambitions:
- Guarantee smooth navigation for its users, in all circumstances.
- Strengthen your visibility on search engines compared to the competition: the majority of mobile traffic comes from SEO, so it was essential to improve page loading speed.
- Relieve servers during peak loads: especially during promotional periods, such as those mentioned above.
The results obtained with the support of Fasterize
Last March, the company’s metrics were in the green and to be celebrated on both mobile and desktop:
- A speed index reduced by 37%;
- Start render reduced by 36%;
- A Time To First Byte reduced by 41%;
Across the different page categories, the teams also made some nice gains. For example, on the mobile version of the homepage, the Speed Index was reduced by almost 60%, TTFB and Start Render were almost halved!
KING JOUET INCREASES ITS TRANSFORMATION RATE BY +5%
The conversion rate increased by 5% the month after the Fasterize solution was connected. The impact was therefore immediately visible.
To learn more about King Jouet’s great journey and web performance results, check out their full success story .
Let us now move on to the second e-commerce site whose performance is to be congratulated.
Rakuten Cuts Speed Index and TTFB in Half
Who are they?
Rakuten is a Japanese group born in the late 90s. Did you know that? On the site’s marketplace, you can find new, used, and reconditioned products, sold by professionals and individuals. Each month, the site records 15 million unique visitors.
SEO is the most important source of traffic for this e-retailer, for whom mobile represents more than 50% of the site’s overall traffic.
To manage all this, the site relies on two internally developed systems: one of the two is used to manage the 100 million product sheets, and the other the 7 to 8 million pages of product lists.
The problems encountered by Rakuten
The main problem encountered by the Rakuten teams can be summed up in one expression: technical debt, at the front-end level. Very significant, it would have required between one and two years of involvement on the part of the technical teams, to optimize everything.
With mobile usage becoming more widespread, and SEO being the main source of traffic for the business, it is necessary to be visible (if not in first position) in search results.
BEST PRACTICES AT RAKUTEN
Within the teams, there was no doubt: the speed of the site absolutely had to be improved. The interest? To anticipate the arrival of UX criteria and speed in Google’s algorithm. Moreover, the teams had already started working on performance optimization. But as in many organizations, the need for resources to push them to the maximum and maintain them over time was too great.
Rakuten’s web performance objectives
Having a mobile first approach, Rakuten’s SEO teams aimed to meet the UX requirements of users and Google.
The company’s objectives include:
- improving UX;
- improving Core Web Vitals for better SEO visibility on search engines and increasing the number of crawled pages;
- the application of best techniques and best practices to be at the state of the art in terms of web performance.
To optimize the performance results of its general marketplace, Rakuten therefore chose to outsource the mission and placed it in the hands of the Fasterize teams.
The results obtained with the Fasterize teams
Last February, Rakuten teams were able to observe the following results on mobile:
- A Speed Index reduced by half;
- A Start Render reduced by -44%;
- A Time To First Byte reduced by -56%.
On desktop the results are also very good:
- -62% for the Speed Index;
- -70% for Start Render;
- -80% for Time To First Byte.
You probably know this figure: 70% of customers who do not return to a page that they considered too slow. With this performance, Rakuten frees itself from such questions. The pages are displayed quickly: customers benefit from a better user experience and no longer (im)patient.
To learn more about Rakuten’s performance gains and developments, check out their success story .
Conforama improves its front-end and boosts its metrics
Who are they?
Conforama is a leader in home equipment: furniture, decoration and even household appliances. The brand has 339 stores in 8 countries, including 239 in France, and achieves an annual turnover of 3.4 billion euros.
The teams want to take their approach further, by improving the front-end, beyond server-side optimizations on their CMS.
Technical and organizational issues related to web performance
Very high load time due to lots of JS etc.
At the start of the project, the teams encountered technical difficulties: the load time of the homepage was 7 seconds. This was mainly due to the many JS and CSS files that were unzipped and weighed heavily, but also to the tag managers that managed third-party scripts (some of which were not used).
Collaboration between the different teams at Conforama and those at Fasterize
The work to improve and simplify the code of the pages had already been started, particularly during the redesigns . Fasterize came to relieve the teams, by automating the optimizations.
In order to clean up the code and resolve the problem linked to the weight of the JS, the Fasterize teams supported the Conforama developers to carry out in-depth work.
In addition to this, marketing teams were integrated into the process: they contributed to optimizing the use of tags. Those that were not used were deleted to further lighten the weight of the pages.
The results obtained through this collaboration
This collaborative work has enabled Conforama to achieve excellent performance results.
Last March, the site’s homepage saw two major indicators reduced by more than half on mobile. The Speed Index was reduced by 74% and the Start Render went from 2.4s to 0.9, a reduction of 62%.
This page, very important for users, allows them to be engaged as soon as they arrive. No waiting, no doubt, and a much smoother and faster journey. Here is an overview of loading with and without Fasterize.
According to Google, 0.1 sec would allow for +8% conversion . A high-performance and fast site can therefore bring in a lot of profits, which reassures the Conforama teams!
Go further and discover the great successes of the Conforama teams by consulting their success stories .
By improving these indicators presented in the article, the e-retailers in this top 3 were able to observe UX, SEO and business improvements. If you too want to be part of the next top of the best performing sites, you know what you have to do: automate your optimizations and follow all the evolutions of Google recommendations. In addition, with Fasterize, you can free up your teams for other priorities. Sustainable and multiple gains!