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Success Story : Bureau Vallee

Bureau Vallée halves its Speed Index with Fasterize!
A real technical challenge for this office supplies site whose page content is highly personalized , and which references the products of 330 franchised stores.

Sector

Traffic

700~800,000 visitors/month

Speed

Loading time ÷2

Earnings

Visitors +30%
Conversions +15%

Context

With 30,000 references in 2018, bureau-vallee.fr experiences an average monthly traffic of 700,000 to 800,000 unique visitors.

The site has been growing steadily for several years, and offers the reservation of items online, some of which are upon delivery.

Since Bureau Vallée physical stores are franchised, the website includes a significant layer of customization : depending on the geographic area, prices, references and available stock, or even commercial operations, etc. The performance of bureau-vallee.fr suffered greatly, particularly due to difficulties in managing caching . Following changes to the site in 2017, the page loading time had even increased from 4 to 8 seconds! This poor performance needed to be remedied quickly and effectively.

Goals

The objective for Bureau Vallée was to bring the Speed Index below 1000. It was 2000 in 2017 and fell below 900 in 2018 with the implementation of Fasterize.

Deployment

Fasterize was implemented at the beginning of 2018, after a test period on the Belgian version of the site, on a small scale (4 stores).

The time savings were immediately noticeable on all levels: on site, for customers, and internally for technical teams.

The site is now efficient and stable , without the technical teams having to intervene extensively on the code.

A redesign is planned for 2019 to migrate to Magento 2, and Bureau Vallée plans to keep Fasterize in particular to manage web performance aspects on an international level .
The site aims for 400,000 product references while offering a common technical base for all countries (Europe and DOM-TOM), knowing that performance issues are not the same everywhere.
The fact that web performance is automated thanks to Fasterize allows teams to move forward with complete peace of mind on the development of new ffeatures as part of this overhaul.

Support

During the deployment of Fasterize, many settings were made with their dedicated Customer Success Engineer (CSE) to get the most out of the platform. The exchanges were daily, then spaced out as the implementation progressed, until everything was in optimal working order.

Teams now continue to use the Fasterize back office autonomously to test and adjust parameters.

When the bureau-vallee.fr redesign is deployed, discussions will resume to proceed with a new implementation. Even if, following this redesign, the performance improvements are not as significant as on the old version of the site, the time savings resulting from the automation of web performance will remain essential for the technical teams.

Results

-9%

poids des pages

-50%

Speed Index

-47%

Start Render

Due to the significant customization of page content, Bureau Vallée could not use a Full Page Cache, which posed a real problem for performance. Fasterize’s SmartCache perfectly met this need. In addition, Fasterize made it possible to reduce CSS, the number of requests (-14%), and to resize images on the fly…
The weight of the pages decreased by an average of 9%, the Speed Index by 50% and the Start Render by 47% .

Fasterize also offers Bureau Vallée complete autonomy to empty and purge caches to ensure optimal data freshness. While teams previously had to contact their host’s support to request that caches be purged, they are now able to do so independently and have even set up automatic purges targeted at certain pages. This is once again a valuable time saving for greater efficiency .

Fasterize is part of a set of solutions implemented to boost sales, in addition to the many developments carried out internally. All these actions combined have allowed Bureau Vallée to boost its natural traffic, and to increase its average basket by 15%, its conversion rate by 15% or its transactions by 30% in one year .

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They testify…

Once the improvement levers were identified, we initially decided to take charge of webperf optimizations ourselves, but we quickly found ourselves short of resources and availability. We then called on Fasterize to save time in reworking the code.

Nicolas GuilbertProduct Owner

Initially, we had requested Fasterize as a short-term 'band-aid'. But we liked the solution so much that we adopted it completely because it allows us to focus on other topics to develop for Bureau Vallée.

Nicolas GuilbertProduct Owner

We worked hand in hand with our CSE, with great responsiveness! We really appreciated being advised on the optimizations to implement on our side to further improve our performance, for example on CSS or on cache parameters. The solution is very malleable, and it is easy for us to intervene in a very short time if there are adjustments to be made.

Nicolas GuilbertProduct Owner

Our expert explains…

The configuration and testing phases carried out with Bureau Vallée allowed us to go beyond our standard optimizations. We adapted our engine to the complex and particular structure of the site to guarantee an optimal experience, particularly on the caching part by relieving their servers thanks to the cache management directly on our platform, and by setting up our crawler in order to preload the most important pages. It was a technical challenge due to the significant customization of the site, and we intervened to fill the gaps, and automate the optimizations that Bureau Vallée had already started to implement.