Petit Bateau bets on speed to boost e-commerce conversion and profitability
Market
Fashion
Traffic
600K sessions per month
Conversions
Context
When acquisition costs skyrocket, every visitor matters. For Petit Bateau, the challenges were multiple: broadening its audience, attracting high-quality traffic, and improving conversion rates, all while keeping profitability in sight.
Petit Bateau, the iconic brand for children’s and women’s clothing, operates seven international e-commerce sites. Faced with a tough retail climate (falling purchasing power, booming second-hand market, declining birth rates) and soaring acquisition costs, the brand needed to capitalise on its website to drive performance.
which meant broadening our audience with qualified traffic that converts to its full potential. »
Customer feedback and NPS results clearly identified site speed as a major pain point. Slow loading times were hampering the user experience, directly impacting both conversion rates and brand perception.
About Barbara and her team
For over three years, Barbara Sohier has served as Digital Data & CRM Director, leading a team structured around three key divisions:
A business division, focused on performance and profitability
A digital journey / UX / customer experience division
A tech division, dedicated to security, stability, and performance
These teams are tightly interconnected: every technical initiative directly affects UX, which in turn drives business performance. Web performance perfectly illustrates this interdependence.
We want partners who make our lives easier, not ones who add extra workload.»
Barbara is highly business-oriented, with a clear vision: improve conversion without blowing up acquisition budgets, relying on quality execution and agile, efficient tools.
The challenge
Economic pressures have reshaped priorities. With acquisition costs sharply increasing and traffic harder to capture, the brand needed to broaden its audience with quality traffic while maximising the efficiency of every visit. Each conversion gained, each bounce avoided, had a direct impact on marketing ROI.
But achieving this required a fast, stable and frictionless experience. At Petit Bateau, web performance had become a real barrier to conversion: slow loading, visual instability, bugs… all undermining brand perception and causing users to drop off.
The solution
Petit Bateau chose Fasterize and its EdgeSpeed solution, which combines automation, agility and minimal workload for internal tech teams. Optimisations are deployed in real time, with no redesign or technical overhead.
After an initial rollout in France, an A/B test was launched in Italy (petit-bateau.it) for three months to measure the impact on conversion.
We wanted to validate this through an A/B test to measure the real incremental conversion uplift with EdgeSpeed.
The result was a complete win: we achieved a 3% increase in conversion on traffic going through Fasterize.»
What makes the difference
Barbara highlights two key aspects: consistency and simplicity.
without us needing to think about them.»
She also emphasises Fasterize’s proactive partnership:
The collaboration is smooth and embedded in the team’s daily operations, with a high level of expertise and constant focus on business impact.
Results
until -70%
in page speed
++
NPS points
+3%
in conversion
Core Web Vitals and web performance metrics improved by 50–70%
+3% conversion rate and revenue uplift, proven through A/B testing
NPS significantly improved, as site speed became a strength rather than a frustration
Web performance is no longer seen as a purely technical issue, it’s now an accelerator of overall performance, driving both customer satisfaction and profitability.
GET A DIAGNOSIS OF YOUR WEBSITE IN JUST ONE CLICK!
What's next?
Petit Bateau plans to enrich the customer experience with more visual content — photos and videos. Thanks to Fasterize, the team knows performance will remain under control, even during high-traffic periods or with heavier assets.
