As part of its redesign project, celio.com faced a major challenge: webperf. What were their objectives? How did they go about it? And what were the results?
Julien Debray, front office IT manager, and Thibaut Duteil, technical architect, testify.
Why did you decide to speed up your website?
What were your objectives?
Julien Debray: “Until last February, celio.com was operated under delegation by a recognized market player. In support of its IT and digital strategy, Celio decided to reinternalize all its digital retail and customer operations, and launched a program to build an omnichannel, customer-focused retail platform, of which the redesign of the celio.com site was a part.From an IT operations point of view, and particularly in terms of performance, the aim was to do better than our previous delegated partner, whose core business had been this for 15 years! So we had quite a long way to go.
We never lost sight of the fact that user experience and sales performance also depend on a site that loads quickly and displays quickly. Amazon has said it over and over again.”
How did you go about it?
Then we approached the development and implementation of this platform with the support of our integrator, renowned for its front-end expertise.
We simply applied and respected best practices: quality of front- and back-end code, performance approach right from the development phase, compliance with publisher guidelines, adapted infrastructure, dynamic ajax pages. We also added a dose of common sense and pragmatism.
We quickly became interested in acceleration solutions, in addition to traditional caching solutions upstream of the infrastructure (CDN and varnish-type caches), such as mod_pagespeed or CloudFlare. We then discovered the Fasterize solution and quickly met Stéphane, CEO of Fasterize and former CIO of RueDuCommerce. We hit it off right away, and quickly understood his approach and what his solution could do for us.
So we decided to carry out a test on our Indian “catalog” site with Fasterize. It was a way of testing the solution without the stakes being high. It made perfect sense for us, since in addition to the FEO, Fasterize offered us a CDN.
The test was quickly conclusive, and we decided to deploy Fasterize for the new celio.com.
During the setup, we really moved forward in complete collaboration with Fasterize and David (Fasterize CTO) carried out a tailor-made setup for our site.”
What impact does this have on your day-to-day business? And for your customers?
Compared to the old platform, the new one is actually faster, as shown by indicators such as the Speed Index and other metrics reported by Google Webmaster Tool. As I said, this is the result of a process involving all the players in the project, to which Fasterize naturally contributed. For example, with Fasterize activated, we’ve seen an average gain of 27% on the speed index, which was already pretty good.
As for the impact on the customer’s side, it’s more difficult to measure than just fast, fluid navigation. Our business indicators are all clearly up, but comparing 2015 and 2014 would be like comparing apples and oranges, because the data and context are different.
In terms of IT operations, there has been no impact on the way we operate the site on a day-to-day basis, and the use of Fasterize services is totally transparent. We’ve shifted a lot of the load away from our infrastructure with the implementation of the Fasterize offer. Having a fast, highly available ecommerce platform is vital for all IT Departments. For us, it’s one less thing to worry about. We can concentrate on our core business.”