Easyvoyage.com is one of the top 5 travel sites in France, with 15 to 18 million monthly page views, and around 55% of traffic coming from mobile.
The website is also among the top of the monthly mobile webperf ranking of the JDN . To understand how this platform maintains and optimizes its performance and loading speed, we spoke with Laurent Vandembergue, CTO of Easyvoyage. How are the teams organized around web performance? What are the keys to a fast site? Let’s go behind the scenes of this major player.
Fasterize: Easyvoyage.com is at the top of the JDN web performance ranking, we definitely want to ask you the question… How do you make your web pages fast and stay that way?
Laurent Vandembergue : At Easyvoyage, performance has always been a priority. It is the business of all teams : Technical, Marketing, Product… we do not have a team dedicated to performance. Loading speed and the quality of the user experience are at the center of attention for each development – and you should know that this is not within the reach of the first developer who comes along ! For example, during a release, the product and UX teams work closely together to validate the technical specifications according to the performance requirements.
The Easyvoyage technical team is made up of around fifteen members to ensure infrastructure management, backend and frontend developments , etc., who continuously monitor performance optimization techniques.
As we are fortunate to be part of a large group with different types of websites ( editor’s note: Easyvoyage is part of the Webedia group which publishes, among others, Allocine.fr, Jeuxvideo.com, etc.) , the technical teams exchange best practices, and it is this sharing of knowledge and skills that allows us to constantly improve.
Fasterize: Has loading speed always been one of your priorities?
LV: Absolutely! Easyvoyage is one of the pioneers among high-traffic sites in France, and we have always made the necessary efforts to optimize the user experience and loading speed, starting with the backend . Indeed, time has a cost on the server side. So, if web pages load quickly, the server needs less time to respond to more user requests, and Google can then crawl more pages to index them. The advantages of loading speed are measured for the user experience and for SEO .
Since performance is part of our DNA, we rely on technologies that go in this direction, to control our entire development chain. Over time, web performance issues have moved from the backend to the frontend , and the use of third-party scripts has grown significantly. They are essential for tracking , value-added features, etc. But if poorly implemented, they can slow down the loading of a web page.
To overcome this phenomenon, we have deployed our own JavaScript framework , in order to concatenate and minify our resources (HTML code, JavaScript, CSS, etc.). This allows us to improve our performance without embedding the heaviness of certain frameworks as they were designed a few years ago.
These frameworks have improved over time, and the challenge now is to be able to integrate them to save development time and apply good webperf practices.
Fasterize: More specifically, what technical levers have you activated to speed up your web pages?
LV : I was just talking about JS frameworks , and we are in the process of migrating to VueJS, obviously taking into account our legacy .
On the infrastructure aspects, we have observed significant improvements thanks to the update of our database (MySQL).
Furthermore, we rely on Java with our own connectors to our database, and we have also virtualized our infrastructure.
Finally, we make sure that our server response time (Time To First Byte, or TTFB – editor’s note ) is as short as possible with intrinsically fast web pages, beyond what our caching strategy can provide – and we also make sure not to make this caching strategy a simple misery cache.
One of the founding projects for improving our performance was the transition to HTTP/2 , which was not very widespread at the time, even though this protocol has since become a standard. We use many subdomains to parallelize requests, and thus optimize the performance of our web pages.
We will also equip ourselves with a CDN to further reduce the effects of network latency, as our traffic is very regionalized. Gaining even 5 milliseconds on the display of the first byte will already be very interesting for us, and we plan to push optimizations further with an image compression and resizing service.
Regarding the frontend, one of our first projects was the overhaul of our platform in its entirety, to optimize the graphic interface and the user experience. The implementation of lazyloading was part of our first developments, we moved to responsive design, and we obviously follow a Mobile First logic to meet Google’s expectations and promote our SEO.
CPU usage observation, and web performance metrics captured using Debugbear tool, with redesign tagging in 2019
Regarding mobile, we take care to test our site under PageSpeed Insights conditions , that is to say on mid-range mobiles with degraded network quality. This context helps us to better understand the speed of the pages of our website, compared to tests that would be carried out on high-end devices with a high flow rate.
During this redesign, we opted for an Atomic Design charter rather than templates, by defining modules that meet our performance requirements, and are available on all pages. The components are thus shared.
In terms of third-party scripts, we have streamlined our Third Parties to keep only the most efficient ones, in consultation with the Marketing team. It should be remembered that we are a media group with a very strong dependence on advertising. Its presence is essential, but it must allow us to maintain the quality of the user experience and the loading speed of the pages of our websites.
As you can see, web performance is a work in progress so that speed is maintained and continuously improved .
Fasterize: Have you set a performance budget or targets to achieve? What indicators do you monitor?
LV : Thanks to the projects we have carried out since 2019, we have achieved the objectives we had set for the backend. We were aiming for a TTFB of less than 0.5 seconds, and according to the observation of our Search Console , we have gone below 230 milliseconds. On the backend side , loading times have been divided by 2 to 3.
We also track our Lighthouse and PageSpeed scores to understand how to optimize our frontend , and we dig into the details of our web page performance with WebPageTest . In particular, we reduced our Speed Index by 20% , and we closely monitor our Start Render and First Contentful Paint (FCP). Since conversion rates are highly dependent on seasonality and pricing, we look at loading speed as a priority to measure the quality of the user experience, rather than those that evaluate the complete loading of web pages, or interactivity, which are less decisive criteria for our CRO.
The JDN ranking is also a very important benchmark for us. It allows us to compare ourselves to the best students on the web, and we want to stay up to date in terms of loading speed, at the level of sites like Skyscanner and Kayak.
We also draw inspiration from other players in the Webedia group, such as Allociné, which is one of the most successful media sites.
Fasterize: Finally, what advice would you give to website publishers who want to optimize their performance and improve their loading speed?
LV : The most important thing to optimize the loading speed of your website: have teams who are aware of performance , who monitor , and who have a precise understanding of how a browser works, beyond mastering the code.
Browsers are evolving rapidly, as are standards around JavaScript, which is why diligent technological monitoring of frontend topics is essential.
Also, good practices must be applied throughout the life of the site , from the design phase. In other words, you have to think about performance from the start, and then on a daily basis.
Recently, when Google announced the Page Experience update and the integration of Core Web Vitals into its algorithm, we immediately got into battle order to meet these new criteria, because it is essential for our visibility – and on this, Google makes the law.
To conclude, I would say that web performance is crucial for user experience and visibility by search engines, and we must also keep in mind that it is a long-term job that has a cost in terms of resources, but for which the efforts pay off.
Where are your loading times? How to measure and optimize your speed?
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