Market
Travel
Traffic
+50% in peaks
Speed
2x more fast pages
in Botify
CMS
Custom
TUI France is a subsidiary of TUI Group, which includes the “made in France” brands Club Marmara, Club Lookéa, and Circuits Nouvelles Frontières. Across 4,000 travel agencies, the TUI Stores network, and its website TUI.fr, the company’s quality of service won an award in March 2020, taking first place in the “Podium de la Relation Client®,” organised by BearingPoint and Kantar in partnership with Salesforce.
This attention to the customer experience is reflected at every level and, naturally, web page speeds are part of that.
For this reason, the user experience has to be optimised on every device, particularly mobile devices, which represent 50% of website traffic and whose usage is constantly growing.
As such, all of TUI’s teams are aware of the importance of loading speeds and of offering a high-quality user experience, no matter the device being used for navigation, including mobile devices.
So, to further boost performance and satisfy the ever-increasing expectations of website users on all devices, the SEO team from TUI.fr took action on two fronts as part of their continuous improvement approach:
- first, by systematically incorporating web performance into the website’s technical optimisations, particularly to meet the requirements of Google in terms of speed;
- second, by continuing the work of educating employees about webperf by implementing training media, tracking tools, and more, in order to make sure that webperf is routinely integrated into every project.
- Taking optimizations further
By turning to Fasterize, the goal of TUI.fr was to further optimise its loading times by relying on recommendations from Google. The basic idea was that if these requirements were met for the SEO aspects, that would naturally have a positive impact on the user experience.
- Absorbing traffic peaks and optimizing the crawl budget
Another important aspect for TUI.fr, whose business experiences seasonal peaks: being able to absorb increases in traffic and maintain a good “time to first byte” and a good speed index, even during heavy traffic.
Indeed, during promotional campaigns, the site must remain available so that customers can finalise their purchases; at the same time, the website must remain fast so that Google can continue to crawl as many pages as possible in as little time as possible.
TUI.fr relies on a custom CMS. The SEO team wanted to deploy Fasterize to meet the company’s business needs, particularly related to content with the greatest ROI.
In spite of a slow period for business because of the pandemic, deployment was fast and was made easier by the involvement of all teams.
- Traffic Limiter
During peak traffic, especially during promotional campaigns, Fasterize can redirect traffic to an overflow page so that the website remains available. This option can be easily activated from the dashboard and can absorb a large number of visits so that the website can handle the load. In terms of SEO, Google can also continue to crawl the website under optimum conditions. As such, it’s an option that addresses all aspects: UX, SEO, and load balancing to relieve servers.
- SmartCache
This feature makes it possible to optimise the cache strategy and facilitates the management of pages containing dynamic content (up to 62% for certain pages). It works by distinguishing dynamic content from static content, caching all content that can be cached. This is essential for landing pages and homepages with high stakes in terms of image and business.
- Images Lazyloading
This technique is applied automatically, helps optimise the loading of images, and boosts the impression of speed. Indeed, Fasterize improves overall performance and with this feature, the engine boosts the perception of speed, which is crucial for UX.
The teams at TUI.fr independently use the Fasterize dashboard to empty the cache, make adjustments as needed, and more. They turn to their dedicated Customer Success Engineer for more advanced settings like, for example, modifications to the SmartCache.
In addition to accelerating the pages of TUI.fr, my goal was to give their teams independence in controlling the optimisations offered by our solution. The guarantee of having all webperf best practices and a smart cache applied automatically to their platform allows the teams to dedicate time to other technical and marketing aspects.
I provide regular support, discussing with them specific matters related to updates to their content. I also track the impact of the optimisations over time.
Results
The involvement of all teams, from both the technical and business sides, enabled rapid implementation of Fasterize, giving a real boost to work already carried out in house.
It has been a success in terms of webperf and marketing KPIs. TUI’s teams have developed their skills while having their workload lightened thanks to the automated optimisation of loading speeds.
To maintain performance in the long run, the SEO team verifies that loading times and all aspects of performance are preserved with each new update made to the website.
After the deployment of Fasterize, the “time to first byte” (TTFB, an indicator tied to indexing) was reduced by 75% on mobile devices for the Club pages and the Speed Index improved by 49% on Holidays pages on mobile devices.
Additionally, the website doubled its number of pages considered “fast” according to Botify.
- Mobile
- TTFB mobile -62 %
- Speed Index mobile -38 %
- Start Render mobile -36 %
- Desktop
- TTFB desktop -60 %
- Speed Index desktop -50 %
- Start Render desktop -38 %
For even more feedback from our customers, and all the details on their business, technical and SEO gains,
discover our Success Stories.
You too can take advantage of all the benefits
of an automatically optimized site:
