But.fr had been working on its loading times, but whenever the slightest change was made to the site, the IT team dedicated to e-commerce often had to start all over again. So, to implement optimisations with lasting effects and stop wasting time on a never-ending task, But.fr’s CTO turned to Fasterize.
Objectives for UX and conversion rates
One of But.fr’s main aims is to enable users to browse online before trying out products in-store. 70 per cent of traffic comes from mobile devices, where every second counts for users. Indeed, a slow website poses a risk to the business, as after a three-second wait, more than half of mobile users leave and do not return. Despite the fact that But.fr’s IT team applied web performance best practices, loading times deteriorated with every new
feature
added or
third-party script
introduced for A/B testing… Web performance optimisation efforts felt like a never-ending cycle. The challenge was therefore twofold:
- to make the site faster, especially on mobile
- maintaining performance over the long term
- saving time for the technical teams
- to strengthen the site’s security.
This furniture specialist, which receives 10 million visits every month, wanted to reduce its Speed Index by 1,000 points (equivalent to 1 second) for the mobile
homepage. From a technical perspective, But.fr wanted,
amongst other things, to benefit from a higher level of resource compression using Brotli, which the Fasterize engine makes easy to deploy.
A quick setup for immediate and lasting results
It took less than a month to implement our SaaS solution, involving five staff members at But.fr supported by a dedicated Customer Success Engineer. The front-end optimisations had an immediate impact (particularly on the homepage: a 66 per cent reduction in the
desktop
Speed Index and a 25 per cent reduction on mobile), whilst Fasterize’s WAF also provided an additional layer of security. Furthermore, the IT department had planned several projects for the coming year: the development of a Smart Cache, the implementation of HTTP/2, Brotli compression and a CDN…
All of these were addressed and rolled out in record time: three weeks instead of the 12 months originally planned! The CTO particularly appreciates the transparency of how the platform works, and the autonomy he has to enable or disable optimisations on his site. The solution has even become his front-office, and the technical teams are now relieved, with more time to focus on development and innovation. The solution continuously adapts to changes on the website. There’s no longer any need to constantly review web performance optimisations; Fasterize does this automatically, providing But.fr’s customers with pages that load faster.
To find out more about the impact of Fasterize, web performance gains and other key figures:
