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Success Story: Phildar boosts website speed and revenue with a 42% increase in conversions

Since 2020, Phildar has experienced significant growth on its e-commerce platforms, Phildar.fr and Pingouin.fr. Their contribution to the company’s revenue soared to 75% in B2C and 45% of total revenue (including B2B) within a year.

The retailer anticipated this digital surge by sustainably accelerating its web page loading speeds, with a strong focus on measuring the ROI of our SaaS solution, which has delivered substantial additional benefits.

Market

Fashion – Leisure

Traffic

6.2M page views/month

on average

Speed

+42% conversions

+36% revenue growth in 1 year

CMS

Magento

Phildar is a retailer specializing in knitting products since 1946. Its collections of yarns and the iconic D10 knitting machine have delighted hobbyists for over 50 years.

The brand records more than half of its traffic and 30% of its conversions from mobile devices. Seasonality plays a key role, with an average of 1 million sessions per month throughout the year, peaking at 1.5 million during winter. These peaks must be effectively managed to ensure a seamless customer experience year-round.

Between 2019 and 2020, the e-commerce site’s revenue doubled, reaching around €10 million—a record achievement compared to the initial goal of 40% annual digital growth. Built on Magento 2, the website’s share of total revenue grew from 15-20% to 45% since October 2020.

Anticipating this growth, Phildar aimed to adopt an automated web performance solution while validating its profitability through A/B testing.

Goals

Profitability is the sinews of war. Beyond the perceived speed essential for driving conversions, Phildar’s e-commerce team maintained a 100% ROI-focused approach. One goal was to convince the IT department of the value of adopting a web performance automation solution.

While the technical teams initially considered managing optimizations internally, the long-term investment for continuous maintenance would have been too resource-intensive. The fast-evolving web performance landscape and ongoing site changes would have made this approach time-consuming and cumbersome.

Phildar’s teams calculated that an increase of just 1.17% in conversions would cover the cost of Fasterize’s SaaS solution, with any additional growth translating directly into profits. This minimized the risk while making the business potential crystal clear.

Deployment

Fasterize’s SaaS solution was deployed over 3 months, covering testing phases, customized tool configurations, and both technical and functional validation.

During the proof of concept (POC) to demonstrate Fasterize’s ROI, traffic was split into two segments: one accessing the optimized version of the site and the other the non-optimized version.

The results were compelling: conversions increased by 3.7%, and revenue grew by 4.2% for visitors to the optimized version of Phildar.fr. This was more than enough to convince the entire team, who proceeded with a full rollout of Fasterize even before the POC was officially completed.

Functional validation was conducted based on a checklist provided by Fasterize’s dedicated Customer Success Engineer. The full deployment followed within 15 days, requiring only minor interventions from Phildar’s hosting provider and IT department.

Support

With limited resources available for Phildar.fr, time dedicated to web performance optimizations is also scarce… and that’s exactly where Fasterize’s team and optimization engine step in.

On the technical side, the engine was specifically configured to reduce the large JS bundles natively generated by Magento, significantly improving loading speeds and, consequently, the user experience.

Optimization efforts are coordinated with Phildar.fr’s other partners, such as AB Tasty and Target2Sell, ensuring seamless compatibility across different solutions.

Results

Mobile

-37%

Speed Index

-59%

Start Render

-80%

Time To First Byte

Desktop

-44%

Speed Index

-41%

Start Render

-76%

Time To First Byte

Beyond the optimizations provided by Fasterize, the unique context of 2020 pushed consumers toward digital channels, resulting in impressive gains for Phildar.fr:

+42% in conversions
+36% in revenue
+10% in page views
+12% in average session duration
-10% in bounce rates on specific channels

Although Phildar.fr plans to redesign its e-commerce platform, the team intends to continue relying on Fasterize’s optimization engine. They recognize that a site redesign alone cannot guarantee long-term speed improvements, and that automating optimizations is the most efficient way to save time and ensure lasting performance.

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They testify...

We had identified speed issues that our customers were complaining about, and we absolutely needed to optimize the performance of our e-commerce platform in anticipation of its growth. We turned to Fasterize because, first, we immediately appreciated the level of expertise of our contacts, and secondly, because we were able to validate the ROI of their SaaS solution.

Emmanuelle ConteE-commerce Manager

I have little time to dedicate to web performance optimizations, and I know I can rely on Fasterize's engine to handle everything automatically. It saves me time, and the technical teams as well! I also rely on the expertise of Fasterize's teams for technical matters. I regularly consult our Customer Success Engineer, for example, on cache strategy topics.

Emmanuelle ConteE-commerce Manager