LISTEN TO THE SUCCESS STORY

Success Story : Conforama

E-commerce site for home equipment, Conforama.fr recorded an average of 1MM monthly visits in 2018. Keen to improve web performance on both the back-end and front-end, especially for mobile, the teams chose to equip themselves with Fasterize. A success linked to the fact that the subject, initially carried by the IT department, won the support of all the teams .

Sector

Furnishings

Traffic

11M visits / month

Speed

Speed Index -49%
Start Render -55%

CMS

Context

Conforama equips the home, from furniture to decoration, including household appliances. The brand has 339 stores in 8 countries, including 239 in France, and achieves an annual turnover of 3.4 billion euros.

Conforama.fr is based on SAP’s Hybris solution , and beyond server-side optimizations, the teams want to take the approach even further by also improving the front-end.

The challenge was to quickly improve loading times for desktop and especially for mobile , while avoiding complex developments.

Goals

At the start of the project, the Load Time of the mobile homepage was 7 seconds. This was due in particular to: 57 JS scripts (2 MB uncompressed), 23 CSS files (394 KB uncompressed) and 5 tag managers to manage several dozen third-party scripts (some of which were unused).

It was therefore a question of simplifying the code of the pages , a project dealt with as the different templates were redesigned, and which Fasterize made it possible to automate.

As for the weight of the JS, in-depth work was done with the developers to clean up the code. The marketing teams were also involved in optimizing the use of tags and removing those that were not used to further reduce the weight of the pages.

Deployment

Upstream, the project leaders carried out educational work internally by demonstrating how Fasterize would simplify processes and relieve resources, particularly production teams.

Support

Before equipping itself with the SaaS solution, Conforama requested an audit from Fasterize, relying on its expertise to highlight the levers for improvement and involve all internal resources. Subsequently, several audits were carried out by Fasterize with a focus on the different aspects of web performance (JS management, tags, etc.) in order to initiate technical improvements in the background.

Teams have become autonomous on the platform for essential needs such as clearing the cache during updates, activating/deactivating certain features, copying configurations from one environment to another to facilitate testing, etc.

With each new release of the site, Conforama calls on its dedicated CSE to review and correct the existing system.

In addition to the SaaS solution, Conforama also benefits from on-site support for 2 days per month. This service includes, among other things, Fasterize’s hosting of monthly webperf committees that bring together all the departments concerned.
These meetings allow the webperf budget and associated action plans to be monitored. In addition, this helps to maintain constant involvement of all teams. Meetings are also organized on specific themes to be able to move forward in accordance with the action plan defined by the webperf committee.

In practice, just before the 2019 summer sales, Conforama.fr for example managed to halve its loading end times by applying Fasterize’s recommendations on third party management.

Results

Mobile

-49%

Speed Index

-55%

Start Render

-11%

Time To First Byte

Desktop

-22%

Speed Index

-22%

Start Render

-63%

Time To First Byte

The integration of Fasterize allowed us to go beyond server performance and to progress on OEM aspects. The success of this project is also largely due to the fact that all the teams are involved, both for the evolution of the site and for the improvement of performance.

The Load Time has dropped to less than 5 s, with the start of loading occurring at 1.39 s. The end of loading which occurred after 13 s now arrives at 5 s.
In July 2018, the Speed Index was 5500 for the mobile homepage, it went to 1003 in 2019, a division by more than 5 .

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They testify…

Our approach was focused on server performance, with load tests, monitoring of server response times, an essentially technical vision of performance. This approach was quite far from the customer experience and did not take into account all the layers that lead a page to be displayed on their browser. We wanted to switch from a totally server-oriented webperf vision to an end-to-end vision in order to take into account what appears on the customers' screen, whether mobile or desktop.

Kaci AgounE-commerce Operations Manager

Fasterize has allowed us to significantly improve our loading times by saving us a major overhaul. The platform does its front-end optimization job perfectly and we are activating our teams around web performance in small projects at the same time, thanks to Fasterize's expertise. We rely entirely on this expertise by making the connection via an internal resource that ensures coordination of the subject.

Kaci AgounE-commerce Operations Manager

The deployment was very fast. We were able to move forward efficiently because we had involved all the departments concerned. Then, as soon as the purchase order was signed, we connected Fasterize in “Discovery” mode to test the solution on our traffic without activating the optimizations at first. After carrying out all the necessary tests and parameter adjustments, the solution was deployed. It was smooth from start to finish.

Kaci AgounE-commerce Operations Manager

Fasterize's expertise is obvious. In addition to the ultra-responsive support, the accompaniment is an important success factor. It even represents half the work, and the platform is also very easy to use. You can plug it in and out as you want, create as many environments as you want... We improve our web performance calmly and efficiently.

Kaci AgounE-commerce Operations Manager