Case Studies: Three Benefits of Automated Performance Optimization


If you go looking for case studies that prove the business value of improving website performance, chances are you’ll encounter a number of studies that focus on obvious ecommerce metrics like cart size and sales. But there are a number of other ways that improving performance can move other business metrics. Today, I want to highlight a few of these metrics using some customer case studies.

Ecommerce Revenue

Since this is the first thing most people ask about, we’ll look at this one first. Proving the benefit of performance on an ecommerce site is a relatively straightforward endeavour through simple A/B testing. This is what we did for AutoAnything.com. CTO Parag Patel knew that his pages were much slower than they should be — with the home page sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to load — but he needed us to prove the ROI for our FastView solution.

First, we demonstrated that FastView could cut page load times in half. Then we conducted an A/B test, serving half of AutoAnything’s traffic the accelerated version of the site and the other half the unaccelerated version. After the trial, we found that the accelerated site moved the numbers on three ecommerce metrics:

AutoAnything.com: FastView leads to improved ecommerce metrics

As I mentioned at the top of this post, ecommerce revenue may be the most obvious metric, but there are other areas where page acceleration can move the needle…

Improved Productivity

At health and wellness ecommerce pioneer LuckyVitamin.com, speed governs every aspect of their business, from the online experience to order fulfilment and shipping. Before implementing FastView, the team at LuckyVitamin.com had spent several years manually optimizing their web pages, and they were very aware of the connection between faster pages, increased revenue, and happier customers. The issue for LuckyVitamin.com was finding a long-term solution that could take over the gruelling labour of manual performance tuning.

Sam Wolf, president of LuckyVitamin.com, told us:

“We’re not an Amazon or a Facebook, who have entire elite teams of developers who specialize in front-end optimization. But with FastView, we could get the same advanced expertise and insight that Amazon and Facebook have, via a product.”

For LuckyVitamin.com, the payoff isn’t just revenue gains, it’s also internal productivity gains. According to Wolf, “We’ve seen about a 10% increase in employee productivity. Now that performance tuning is no longer part of our developers’ workload, they can get back to concentrating on feature development.”

Network and CDN Cost Savings

Revenue and productivity gains are extremely compelling arguments for performance automation. A third gain — and one that frequently comes as a pleasant surprise — is the savings in network and CDN costs.

At AutoAnything.com, implementing FastView resulted in significantly reduced monthly CDN costs. This makes complete sense. FastView compresses and consolidates page resources, as well as leverages the user’s browser cache. As a result, fewer resources are called from the server and significantly less data travels over the network.

LuckyVitamin enjoyed similar benefits via our FastView service:

“Being able to optimize via the cloud is incredible. We’ve eliminated a huge potential network overhead. This alone makes FastView pay for itself right out of the gate.”

Learn More

Revenue, productivity, and network savings are just three of the benefits of front-end web performance automation. To learn more, read more of our FastView customer stories.

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Tammy Everts

As a former senior researcher, writer, and solution evangelist for Radware, Tammy Everts spent years researching the technical, business, and human factor sides of web/application performance. Before joining Radware, Tammy shared her research findings through countless blog posts, presentations, case studies, whitepapers, articles, reports, and infographics for Strangeloop Networks.

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