The ambition of any e-commerce site: to offer an excellent UX, the effects of which are reflected in the turnover, satisfaction and loyalty of their customers. If UX covers many facets, the speed of displaying pages is obviously an essential prerequisite: there is no point in having the most beautiful store if your customers cannot get through the front door. And the teams at Aigle and TUI have understood this well: UX is at the heart of their concerns and they have decided to make web performance one of their priorities .
In this article, we take you through their stories, their webperf adventures, their motivations: how it all started, their “why”? And finally, we will take stock of the results obtained. We are sure that their journey will echo yours in several points!
To assess their performance, we relied on key metrics:
- Time To First Byte or TTFB: this is the server response time.
- Start Render / FCP: this indicator marks the moment when the page stops being white .
- speed index: here, it is about measuring the speed of displaying elements in the viewport, a very important metric for UX. The speed index measures what the user sees, rather than what the browser technically does.
- CLS , one of the famous 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, measures the time it takes for the largest visual element on the page to load and display .
The FID is not presented in this article, as all data collected are lab data.
A customer experience recognized and refined down to the smallest details for TUI
TUI France, the made in France subsidiary of the TUI group
It is the leader in the French tourism market . TUI France includes the made in France brands Club Marmara, Club Lookéa and Circuits Nouvelles Frontières. These brands have been grouped together on Tui.fr, generating ever-increasing traffic . In its 4,000 travel agencies, the TUI Stores network, and on its TUI.fr website , the quality of service was awarded in March 2020 with first place on the Podium de la Relation Client ®, organized by BearingPoint and Kantar, in partnership with Salesforce.
Always with the aim of offering the best customer experience, the TUI teams wanted to make their site efficient on all types of devices .
It all started with the need to ensure a smooth UX for all its users.
Within the TUI teams, webperf was a project initiated by the SEO teams . But the attention paid to customer experience is found in all teams. And the speed of web pages is naturally part of it! Their watchword: an optimal user journey on all media, and especially on mobile. Indeed, 50% of traffic comes from mobile and this usage continues to grow.
Since page loading speed is the primary requirement of mobile users, all teams (marketing, tech, SEO, etc.) are made aware of the importance of loading speed.
Meeting the expectations of mobile users: the prowess of the SEO team
In order to boost its performance and meet the growing expectations of Internet users and mobile users, the TUI.fr SEO team has acted on two levels as part of a continuous improvement process:
- on the one hand, it systematically integrated web performance into the technical optimizations of the site, in particular to meet Google’s speed requirements;
- On the other hand, this team took the time to evangelize internally around webperf . Educational materials and monitoring tools are all elements that have made it possible to create a routine that makes webperf integrated into each project.
To go even further in their approach, the TUI teams decided to seek support from experts to integrate Google’s recommendations.
They therefore needed a complete solution that would:
- continue work on loading speed ;
- absorb peaks in load while maintaining a good Time To First Byte and a good Speed Index even in the event of high traffic.
Like many online sales sites, TUI’s activity is punctuated by seasonal peaks . Indeed, following promotional campaigns, the site must remain available so that customers complete their purchases, but also fast, so that Google can continue to crawl a maximum of pages in a minimum of time.
This is why the teams chose Fasterize experts to lead the webperf project and thus continue what they had started.
TUI x Fasterize: the results of the collaboration
In just a few weeks, all of the company’s web performance metrics have turned green and are celebrating:
- A speed index reduced by 33% on mobile;
- A start render / FCP reduced by 42%;
- A time to first byte almost divided by 3: -58%!
To understand the different stages of TUI in more detail, check out their full success story !
Eagle combines performance and decarbonization plan
Aigle, a committed French company
A brand known for its famous boots, Aigle produces 75% of its boots in its factories located in Châtellerault. But the company also offers outdoor clothing and has seen (and still sees) its online activity increase. In a few figures, Aigle is:
- 21 million page views,
- 2.8 million visitors per year on average;
- traffic peaks between November and February of up to 2.2 million page views per month.
But Aigle is also a brand that is strongly committed to the environment . The company has a decarbonization plan that aligns with the Paris Agreements and chooses its suppliers with the UN Global Compact.
To meet the needs and requirements of Internet users and support the growth of e-commerce activity, the company relies on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud CMS.
UX and eco-design, Aigle’s major ambitions
The Aigle teams had multiple challenges:
- improve their conversion rate;
- strengthen their presence in SERPs;
- optimize the mobile site to match Internet users’ new browsing habits;
- but also the desire to offer a more eco-responsible website .
It was in particular an eco-design audit that triggered the webperf optimization process within the organization. As the company has several commitments to reduce its environmental impact, webperf appeared as an essential lever. It aligns with eco-design issues and is at the intersection of Aigle’s multiple ambitions.
Web performance, a common lever for many issues
As you will have understood, web performance covers many benefits and plays a decisive role in improving UX, can influence positioning in SERPs, and also shares issues with eco-design. This is why Aigle’s digital teams have chosen to integrate it into their actions.
However, optimizing mobile performance turned out to be a more technically complex mission than on desktop. Indeed, the power of the devices and the network are more random. Fasterize’s all-in-one solution therefore allowed these teams to lead and link all these projects at the same time, while saving time and being supported by experts.
The fruits of the Aigle x Fasterize synergy
From the first half of the year, the company recorded positive performances:
- speed index has been reduced by 33% on mobile;
- start render/FCP decreased by 37%;
- A 52% decrease in Time To First Byte.
Discover the company’s success story to learn more about their results and support.
Result: the efforts of the Aigle and Tui teams to improve their performance have paid off! By automating their web performance, Aigle and Tui have indeed achieved their objectives: improving their UX and conversion rate, while reducing their digital carbon footprint, and all this in just a few weeks. If you too want to rise to the top of the best performing sites in record time, discover our EdgeSpeed solution or contact us!