Introduction
design-bestseller.de is a leading online retailer for designer furniture. The offer a wide range of design classics from brands such as Vitra, USM Haller, Knoll International or Hay. In a competitive market where the fastest website is a strategic advantage, they aimed to push their performance to the highest level possible. Their goal was to ensure the quickest loading times and the smoothest user experience to maximize customer satisfaction.
"The implementation of Speed Kit was remarkably smooth, and the cooperation with their team was seamless. Our website's performance has significantly improved, especially on product pages, enhancing user satisfaction."
Challenge
Solution
To tackle this challenge, design-bestseller.de implemented Speed Kit. Speed Kit was designed to accelerate the website by leveraging advanced caching and content delivery optimization techniques. The integration was straightforward and required minimal disruption to the existing infrastructure.
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
The results of integrating Speed Kit were remarkable. Across the board, design-bestseller.de saw substantial improvements in key performance metrics:
- Overall improvement: The median Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was 27% faster.
For their product pages, the results were even more pronounced:
- Page type product: The median LCP was 370 milliseconds faster, representing a 39% increase in speed.
- Desktop performance: Desktop LCP decreased from 867ms to 439ms.
- Mobile performance: Mobile LCP dropped from 1084ms to 805ms, a notable 279ms improvement.
The enhancements have not only boosted user satisfaction but also increased the overall page impressions and engagement metrics. These results underscore Speed Kit's effectiveness in enhancing website performance, providing design-bestseller.de with a significant competitive edge in the online retail market.
