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Success Story: Best Western France

Best Western France wanted to improve the speed of its site to take advantage of the UX, SEO and business impact of better loading times.
Several challenges: optimizing conversions on mobile , crawl budget and indexability , without intervening on the code.

Sector

Hospitality

Speed

Core Web Vitals: -45 to -92%

CMS

Custom

Context

Best Western Hotels & Resorts is a group of independent hotels with nearly 4,700 hotels in more than 100 countries, including France, which has nearly 300 establishments . From economy to luxury, each affiliated hotel meets common quality standards while remaining independent. Best Western France wanted to assert the quality of its services from the online booking stage.

The site is developed internally based on a custom CMS, and the technical part is administered by the headquarters. Local teams must therefore manage their content within the technical framework defined by Best Western International.

Mobile accounts for a significant portion of traffic , but the conversion rate remains lower than desktop. This trend can be explained in particular by the size of the average basket, which leads users to do their research via mobile, then finalize their purchase on desktop, often after discussing the terms with the people with whom they will share their trip. From this research phase, the online experience must be optimal, because if the pages load slowly, the user will not come back to finalize their purchase.

Goals

The French teams wanted to offer the best possible experience to their customers by improving the loading speed of their website pages. Indeed, the faster the navigation, the more conversions increase, and the more pages Google robots can index.

In addition to UX and SEO objectives, Best Western aimed to optimize its landing pages in order to make its Ads campaigns profitable , and to focus on mobile, in order to make up for the conversion gap compared to desktop.

Finally, all sites must rely on the services provided by the headquarters in the United States, which can involve long server response times . To limit this phenomenon, the Best Western France teams decided to optimize all aspects of the front-end that could be optimized locally, without touching the site code.

Deployment

The configuration phase of the Fasterize optimization engine was punctuated by discussions to coordinate the actions of the French teams and the web agency service provider.

Only 2 resources were requested from Best Western France with interventions spread over 10 to 12 weeks in total .

Accompaniement

In addition to the support and guidance provided with Fasterize’s SaaS solution, Best Western France teams rely on an additional expert support service . It allows them to improve their skills in web performance and to have deliverables with in-depth data analysis to share with technical teams and management.

For specific needs (scaling up, technical migration, securing in the event of an attack, etc.), support is available to offer solutions immediately. A responsiveness noted by the Best Western France teams who feel listened to and supported, and who appreciate the suggestions and proactivity of Fasterize experts to push performance ever further.

Support

The SmartCache

The Best Western France website offers dynamic and personalized content on 100% optimized pages. Fasterize’s intelligent cache optimizes and caches all static content, distinguishing dynamic content. Teams can also empty their cache independently for immediate content updates.

Lazyloading

Fasterize’s SaaS solution allows bestwestern.fr to automatically benefit from the advantages of lazyloading, for a better user experience.
This is a technique that the teams would not have had the opportunity to deploy internally due to lack of time and resources. In addition, lazyloading is applied correctly to improve the Largest Contentful Paint , one of the 3 Core Web Vitals metrics that Google takes into account in its algorithm for SEO.

The Fasterize extension

Best Western France teams regularly rely on the Fasterize extension, which helps them verify that pages are well optimized, and debug them if necessary. Being able to enable and disable optimizations locally allows you to check the impact of corrections on performance.

Results

-92%

Largest Contentful Paint

-76%

Total Blocking Time

-49%

CLS

Thanks to the automation of front-end optimizations, the site’s performance is improved on both mobile and desktop, and navigation is much smoother.

This impact is measured among other things on the Core Web Vitals with:

a Largest Contentful Paint reduced by 92% on the home desktop ,
a Total Blocking Time (equivalent to the First Input Delay) reduced by up to 76% on hotel listings on mobile,
a 49% improved CLS on certain hotel listings on mobile.

On the desktop site homepage, the Start Render is reduced by 78%, and the Speed Index is improved by 69% on mobile.

Best Western France records significant traffic peaks, particularly following promotional operations. The site can then accommodate several thousand visitors simultaneously .
With fast pages and an optimized front-end, the service remains available and the pages continue to load quickly for all users, in order to boost conversions on all devices !

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They testify…

With Fasterize, gains are easy and instantaneous. It is an immediate solution that has allowed us to obtain significant results, without effort and without modifying our site.

Théo CanovasAcquisition Manager / Traffic Manager

Our webperf optimization approach is guided by 3 priorities: offering the best experience to all our users, optimizing our SEO positioning with better indexed and greater numbers of fast pages, and developing our mobile business. Fasterize supports us in meeting all these objectives while respecting our technical constraints, and also allows us to acquire in-depth knowledge on webperf.

Sébastien BovardDigital and Information Systems Director

Since deploying the SaaS solution, we have become familiar with KPIs that we now observe over time. There is really a before and after Fasterize! We are learning a lot, and we now have a benchmark to track web performance as our site evolves, which also allows us to guide our service providers. The solution is very technical, but we also have access to data in formats that are understandable and suitable for all internal teams, to demonstrate the ROI of the solution.

Sébastien BovardDigital and Information Systems Director

Once Fasterize is deployed, everything is so smooth that you might tend to forget about it. But you can clearly see the difference in performance when the solution is unplugged! We had to disable optimizations to run some tests, a great opportunity to remember the impact of this Next-Gen CDN on loading speed.

Théo CanovasAcquisition Manager / Traffic Manager

Our expert explains…

In collaboration with the Best Western France teams, the implementation of Fasterize quickly bore fruit in terms of performance and user experience. Our support continues beyond the automation of best practices, with personalized recommendations and monitoring of changes made to the site to maintain optimal metrics.