What are the challenges of a banking sector website? As is the case for many competitive markets, it is a question of ensuring brand visibility and quality of service to assert its positioning. Quality of service must obviously be reflected in the fluidity of online journeys, loading speed being the number one requirement of users. In order to optimize all of its performances, FLOA called on Fasterize to carry out a webperf audit. Based on what findings, and with what results? Feedback from Julien Brec, IT Manager.
Fasterize: What is FLOA’s business, and what are the digital challenges for a credit bank?
Julien Brec: FLOA is the French leader in payment solutions, a third of split payments in France are made through FLOA, which has 3 million customers in 2021. We joined the BNP-Paribas group at the start of 2022.
Our offer is based on consumer credit, payment cards and cash back solutions . Major brands such as Cdiscount, Casino or GO Sport rely on our split payment solutions, and we also offer the possibility of taking out instant mini-loans in partnership with CDiscount, Lydia and bankin.
We are resolutely digital oriented! While payment cards can be subscribed in store, we do not have physical branches. This is why the online experience must be impeccable to support and satisfy our users throughout their journey: from the credit comparison tool to the choice of offer.
We need to address SEO visibility issues , which means having a fast site to meet Google’s requirements, especially since its Page Experience update .
Furthermore, our business objectives must also be supported by the quality of our user experience . A loan is a major commitment , and if from the beginning of the journey, the user is faced with a slow and faulty site, he will tend to be wary rather than trusting .
Why did you contact Fasterize for a webperf audit? Had you already tried optimizations internally?
JB: First of all, we heard feedback from our customers who told us about some slowness on the site. This is a strong signal.
We also measured our performance, knowing that even if the Marketing teams validated the functional aspects before going online, we were not at the state of the art in terms of web performance.
As our website evolved, our code became more complex, and we needed an outside perspective to help us take a step back. For example, the audit allowed us to point out the fact that we had asynchronous calls to scripts that themselves contained synchronous scripts, which was counterproductive. Some of our pages contained calls to YouTube videos that significantly degraded our performance… Listing all these weak points was necessary to have a solid working basis that could be used by all teams.
Before the Fasterize audit, we had started to optimize the code, based on the analysis of data from monitoring tools such as Dareboost, Google PageSpeed Insights , CrUX… with some trial and error.
In terms of metrics, we had chosen to follow the server response time ( TTFB ), the Core Web Vitals that Google recommends optimizing to support SEO… And we came to the conclusion that webperf is an expertise in its own right , and that we needed to be supported to be sure to move in the right direction.
Indeed, once we collect data on the performance of a website, it is not so easy to interpret it and apply the right techniques.
Concretely, we had noticed that our server response time was not optimal. We could have deduced that we needed to increase the capacity of our servers, however we noticed that they were only used at 30% of their capacity. The optimization of the Time To First Byte by the Infra was not the right path, and we could have mistakenly embarked on an expensive project that would not have solved our web performance problems.
As a quick fix , we then implemented a first level of HTML cache to improve the loading speed of our pages. We were able to save 0.5 seconds on the TTFB. An initial work on the weight of the images and the number of fonts had also been carried out, allowing us to save a few tens of milliseconds. But we knew that this was only a first step, while waiting for our complete webperf audit which would help us go much further in our speed optimization process.
So, rather than getting lost and scattering our efforts, we chose to work with Fasterize to have an in-depth analysis and relevant recommendations.
In terms of organization, the intervention of external experts is also an asset to bring all the internal teams into agreement on the procedure to follow: Technical, Product, Marketing, Design, etc.
What lessons did you learn from this speed audit, what will you apply and how?
JB: Fasterize’s webperf audit gave us very specific technical leads . We were able to draw lessons from it that match our business needs , understand which KPIs and actions to prioritize . We are now focusing on TTFB, total page weight , Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, one of Google’s Core Web Vitals taken into account in the PageSpeed score), and Speed Index .
Compared to the performance gains we had observed with our quick fixes , we still saved half a second on the loading time of our pages on average. The optimization of our resources, HTML, JavaScript and CSS code, also allowed us to reduce the average weight of all our pages by 40% !
The audit recommendations also allow members of all teams to improve their skills on the subject of web performance, by better understanding what is behind the metrics, and how to use them to meet our business challenges, customer experience, SEO, etc.
Since the restitution of the Fasterize webperf audit, we have planned several waves of tasks to be processed in a context of change of infrastructure and development environment.
For example, we are revising our entire content personalization system with an adapted cache strategy , to be able to load static content as quickly as possible for our users (Fasterize’s SaaS solution allows us to automate the caching of content on dynamic pages – editor’s note ). If we realize that the changes made by the personalization layer have little value, or even if they have a negative impact on the display speed, we keep the static elements and do not reload the content.
Regarding image compression and resizing , essential webperf optimization levers, we have also made a real leap forward. We had already started to optimize their weight with a few quick win mode corrections , for example by switching to SVG format. But we were still seeing anomalies relating to the weight and loading of pages, images loaded multiple times by the browser, etc. The Fasterize webperf audit allowed us to move up a gear in terms of image optimization and loading management with techniques such as lazyload, preload, etc. (NB: Fasterize’s SaaS solution allows you to compress all the images on a site on the fly to the most efficient new generation formats such as WebP, recommended by Google, and AVIF, which is even more efficient – editor’s note ).
Following this audit, have you changed your working methods and your organization around web performance?
JB: From now on, when teams design a new product or new features, web performance is a mandatory part of the specifications. We ensure that our performance budget is maintained : before developing our site, we check the impacts on our KPIs and on loading speed, and balance them with the value provided by this development.
Implementing the audit recommendations is a major undertaking, and we are moving forward in stages depending on the availability of the teams. We have prioritized the tasks, starting with those that have the greatest impact and require the least effort.
Our goal is to deploy all optimizations for optimal results, and we also need to organize ourselves according to periods of commercial activity, so that speed optimization is an accelerator and not a brake.
What are your next steps?
JB: Next step after image compression and code cleaning: optimizing our cache strategy, from which we expect a lot in terms of technical and business impacts!
We will set up the cache of our static objects via our CDN, we will also optimize our HTML cache with a new methodology. This is a new challenge to take on, and it is surely not the last since the webperf culture is now developing among all teams.
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