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Success Story : Villages Clubs Du Soleil

Villages Clubs du Soleil offers all-inclusive stays in the mountains or at the sea. By improving its loading speed, this travel specialist has reduced its bounce rates by 20% .

Sector

Journey

Traffic

12M visits
in 2018

Earnings

Bounce rate -20%

CMS

Context

Villages Clubs du Soleil are 18 all-inclusive holiday villages , including 12 mountain villages, 5 by the sea, and 1 in the city.

Web performance was a new challenge, driven by the Product Owner who already had experience on the subject.

All the teams had already identified slowness on the site. They also knew that this problem could be prohibitive for the UX and promote the bounce rate, but they had not managed to identify the reasons.

In terms of financial impact, the entry ticket being approximately 5000 euros, each lost sale represents a significant loss of earnings for the site .

Bounce rate and cart abandonment therefore have a potentially significant impact on turnover.

So, to the extent that pages that load too slowly can drive away Internet users, the interest in making the browsing experience as fluid as possible has unanimously emerged as an obvious need .

Goals

The bounce rate was defined as the main performance indicator without setting a quantified objective at the start of the webperf optimizations. The aim was to reduce it on both desktop and mobile, since 50% of the site’s traffic comes from mobile .

In addition to the bounce rate, Villagesclubsdusoleil.com also needs to offer quality visuals to ensure its brand image , while minimizing the impact on the weight of the pages.

Deployment

Villages Clubs du Soleil entrusted the creation of its site to a partner agency with whom Fasterize organized training on the platform.

The integration took place over 2 weeks , after demonstrating the sustainability of Fasterize’s contributions over time, and setting up a responsibility matrix (RACI) so that the role of each participant was clear.

The testing process for the Discovery phase was scrupulously followed by the Villages Clubs du Soleil teams, with only a few tags to modify to determine the elements to cache.

The favorite feature: Traffic Limiter

Traffic Limiter is a Fasterize feature that allows you to activate an overflow page in the event of a traffic spike. Villagesclubsdusoleil.com could already accommodate many more visits while preserving the fluidity of navigation thanks to the optimization of static resources.

But if there was a significant increase in the volume of searches and bookings for stays using the database, the response time could become such that customers could no longer be served within a reasonable time frame.
Fasterize therefore helped Villages Clubs du Soleil to define the right maximum number of sessions from which Internet users are redirected to the overflow page so that everyone can enjoy smooth navigation.

Support

Every 3 months, Fasterize sends Villages Clubs du Soleil a detailed report on the impact of the platform on raw performance .

Another service that Villages Clubs du Soleil appreciates: being alerted of planned updates and developments, and overall the quality of listening and the personalized relationship with the dedicated Customer Success Engineer.

Results

Mobile

-37%

Speed Index

-50%

Start Render

-59%

Time To First Byte

Desktop

-36%

Speed Index

-50%

Start Render

-63%

Time To First Byte

Fasterize optimized all cacheable content with a notable effect on the bounce rate which dropped by almost 20% on both desktop and mobile .

In terms of raw performance, since the SaaS solution was plugged in, Fasterize has enabled the following optimizations.

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They testify…

I had initially asked to lower the image quality to speed up loading times, but the marketing teams couldn't accommodate this constraint over time. Thanks to Fasterize, we were able to return to good quality images without affecting the speed of the site. The fact that they are optimized on the fly and no longer by our CMS makes the process much more efficient and faster.

Jacques-Antoine MathiouProduct Owner

In the Run phase, Fasterize can be disabled and reactivated very easily, and Support can be contacted at any time with excellent responsiveness. We use the Traffic Limiter, either to handle peak loads, or during major production launches requiring the intervention of different service providers before opening to the general public. In the latter case, this greatly facilitates the opening and management of rights compared to more traditional systems.

Jacques-Antoine MathiouProduct Owner

To raise awareness of the importance of web performance, I chose to communicate on a business indicator that everyone can understand: the bounce rate. I deliberately did not communicate on technical indicators, even though I monitor them, so that the speech reaches as many people as possible internally.

Jacques-Antoine MathiouProduct Owner

Our expert explains…

Fasterize was deployed quickly thanks to an effective collaboration with Villages Club du Soleil and their partner agency. The dashboard was taken in hand to benefit independently from the platform's functionalities. Also, my support goes beyond the deployment of the solution by maintaining personalized and regular contact to provide my web performance expertise.