Is your site fast enough? Is the loading time of web pages satisfactory for your users?
Web performance is crucial to sales, because fast-loading pages improve the user experience. In fact, it’s the most important UX criterion for web users, and Aniss Boumrigua understands this. Here we meet the IT Manager at RueDuCommerce, for whom maintaining a fast-loading site is part of everyday life.
Fasterize: Why should web performance be a top priority for IT teams?
Aniss Boumrigua: I’d go so far as to say that webperf should be a top priority for the whole company! For RueDuCommerce , which offers a catalog of several million products, the UX must be optimal. This means: the right offer at the right price, and fluid navigation to give us the best chance of achieving high conversion rates.
The subject of loading times may seem to be a technical matter, but in reality it concerns all teams, because it’s closely linked to UX, andUX brings together all professions: IT, marketing and business. In fact, we’re seeing the SXO (search experience optimization) profession develop in many organizations.
So webperf is also linked to business?
A.B.: Yes, totally. Web performance, or Front-End Optimization (FEO), is strategic because it promotes transformation and conversion rates. It comes under the UX umbrella, but as it’s still a relatively new discipline, many UX designers don’t have in-depth knowledge of the subject. This is no doubt due to the fact that mobile traffic was lower a decade ago. With the explosion in mobile traffic, performance has become a crucial issue.
Connections are sometimes degraded, and although devices are becoming increasingly powerful, they also have their limits. FEO was born out of the need to address these new browsing and consumption modes.
How has RueDuCommerce adapted to the explosion in mobile browsing?
A.B.: Until September 2017, performance and user experience measurement was not optimal. But since then, we’ve moved to almost real-time monitoring. At Rue du Commerce, we quickly understood the importance of having optimal loading times on all devices, so we worked by focusing on the following KPIs: Speed Index, Time To First Byte, Start Render, and Time To Interactive.
In January 2018 we began the first optimizations, which enabled us to improve our conversion rates. But that year, a significant proportion of our traffic switched to mobile, and we had to redouble our efforts to maintain our performance. In terms of gross performance on mobile, our Speed Index rose from 10,000 in September 2017 to 2,900 in March 2018, reaching 2,000 in early 2019.
Faced with this major undertaking, where did you start?
A.B.: We thought that Third Parties and advertising had a strong contribution to the site’s slowness, whereas we needed to review the optimization of the site as a whole. To identify these problems, we turned to Fasterize, who helped us to develop our technical skills and knowledge. We then understood that there is no miracle formula, but that webperf is a multitude of actions that must be intelligently articulated to work together.
First of all, we cleaned up the code so that when the browser receives a page, there are as few DNS resolutions as possible, and resources are minimized and concatenated (JS, CSS, images, etc.). We also carried out server-side optimizations by switching to HTTPS and then HTTP/2, and cleaned up headers to further accelerate page loading…
So, in less than 2 years, you’ve succeeded in making all your teams aware of webperf? That’s really impressive!
A.B.: The Management Committee prioritized Webperf, with ROI measurements to back it up, showing the correlation between loading time and conversion rate. We set out to climb back up the JDN rankings with the success we now enjoy, both on the IT side and the marketing side (editor’s note: RueDuCommerce has topped the JDN webperf rankings since 2018). From now on, when marketing, product or AMOA teams have new projects, they consult us upstream on the webperf aspects so that we can guide them.
For example, we’ve added videos to our product sheets. The initial integration was very cumbersome, with JS libraries that had an impact on page loading times. We therefore worked on an alternative integration and organized ourselves to favor server-sidesolutions to facilitate data retrieval and processing without impacting page loading. For the development of this product, IT and marketing worked hand in hand, advised by Fasterize to bring all skills together in very short sprints. Thanks to the webperf reporting tools and ongoing work on this subject, I can no longer even speak of dedicated webperf resources, as it is such an integral part of the DNA of all RueDuCommerce teams.
We’re also hearing more and more about the impact of webperf on SEO. What does this mean for RueDuCommerce?
According to Google experts, there’s a link between webperf and SEO, and it can have an impact on ranking. A slow site can be penalized. Conversely, if a site is fast, the user is satisfied and more likely to return, which will improve its ranking in the SERPs. But I believe that, above all, page display speed should be considered for users and not just for Google – just as we optimize our content for readers and not just for search engines.
For RueDuCommerce, one of the effects we’ve been able to measure by improving our loading times is the increase in crawls:
For some years now, Google has been working towards a faster web, promoting the development of Progressive Web Apps.
Modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox) are constantly developing technologies that enable the development of optimized sites. The support of workers services is proof of this.
What do you think is the best way to organize teams around webperf?
A.B.: Cost is an important consideration. RueDuCommerce has an IT department where engineers and developers work on webperf, and we do a lot of optimization in-house.
It’s a constant investment and an ongoing monitoring and training program that’s no mean feat. The sector is constantly evolving, and what’s in force now may not be in a few years’ time. You have to keep up to date. But for many companies who don’t have the resources or the budget, equipping themselves with an automation tool is still a very attractive proposition. With Fasterize, for example, customers don’t have to install anything on their own servers, and the solution is totally malleable. It works like a CDN. I’d say that if you’re comfortable with a CDN, you can be comfortable with a webperf optimization automation solution like Fasterize.
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