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Introduction
Decathlon is one of the world's leading sporting goods companies with a website that receives a high volume of traffic from customers looking to purchase their products online. Decathlon has always identified page speed as a key metric to drive conversion and revenue. For this, Decathlon Germany has been working with Speed Kit for a number of years to accelerate their website loading times to improve the user experience and increase sales.
"After a long partnership, we still highly recommend the great service of Speed Kit. The team behind has proven again and again that page speed matters immensely to improve user experience, increase the SEO ranking, and drive conversions."
Challenge
Solution
Speed Kit is a website acceleration software designed to improve the page speed of highly dynamic ecommerce websites like the ones Decathlon runs. Using a combination of browser and cloud technologies together with innovative caching algorithms, Speed Kit helps Decathlon to significantly improve Time to First Byte (TTFB) as well as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) across all devices. This is leading to an improved user experience and in turn increases various ecommerce KPIs as well as top-line revenue.
Speed Kit is an official ACE eligible technology partner and independent software vendor (advanced tier) of the AWS Competency Partner Program "Accelerate" as well as the Workload Migration Program. Our technology is powered by 13 different AWS services:
- Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS): We use EKS to schedule and orchestrate our Speed Kit applications on EC2 instances.
- Simple Storage Service (S3): Speed Kit stores cached assets in S3 buckets. Additionally, we store RUM (Real User Monitoring) and PI (Performance Insights) data in S3 buckets for analytics purposes.
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Our workloads are hosted on EC2 instances, as managed through EKS.
- Kinesis Data Streams: Kinesis Data Streams are used to ingest RUM and PI data from Speed Kit, which is then consumed by Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Fastly also streams access logs to our Kinesis Data Stream, which are similarly consumed by Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink.
- Athena: We use Amazon Athena to query data stored in AWS S3 buckets, enabling performance insights and asset preloading.
- Elastic Container Registry (ECR): Docker images are stored in ECR and deployed in our Kubernetes cluster, which is managed by EKS. For third-party application images, we use the pull-through-cache feature of ECR.
- Elastic Container Service (ECS): We build Docker images using a service hosted on Amazon ECS.
- Route 53: Route53 is used to manage DNS records.
- Simple Email Service (SES): We use SES is used for sending transactional emails.
- Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK): We use MSK to facilitate consuming and producing custom event records for different applications.
- DynamoDB: Speed Kit uses DynamoDB to store information related to our predictive preload feature.
- Lambda: We use Lambda to pre-render client side renderd pages to make that actual server side rendered.
- ElastiCache (Redis OSS): We use ElastiCache to store our Bloom filter, which checks whether an asset is present in our cache.
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Click the image to open the architectual diagram of Speed Kit with AWS
Results
In a long-term ROI analysis project, real user monitoring was employed in an A/B-test to evaluate the impact of faster loading times on business success metrics.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):
The study revealed a significant decrease in loading times and an increase in business success metrics, confirming the importance of page speed for driving sales - even for already very fast websites. These findings were statistically significant, validating the positive impact of faster loading times on business performance.
Time to First Byte (TTFB):
