Introduction
Snocks is a dynamic and innovative brand specializing in high-quality, comfortable everyday essentials. Known for their premium socks, underwear, and loungewear, Snocks blends modern design with unparalleled comfort, creating products that not only look great but feel great too. With a commitment to using sustainable materials and offering long-lasting durability, Snocks is dedicated to providing customers with versatile wardrobe staples that enhance both style and comfort. Whether you're looking for socks that stay in place all day or premium undergarments designed for ultimate comfort, Snocks combines functionality with a sleek, minimalist aesthetic to meet the needs of the modern consumer.
"With Speed Kit, we achieved exceptional speed improvements that we could measure and validate through A/B testing. Our customers now experience the fast, frictionless browsing they expect from Snocks."
Challenge
Snocks has built a strong reputation for its high-quality basics, specializing in comfortable and durable socks and underwear. With origins on Amazon, Snocks’ customers were accustomed to fast load times, leading to high expectations for speed on Snocks' direct e-commerce site. To ensure an optimal user experience, Snocks needed to improve loading times across their site, focusing on core performance metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB).
Optimizing loading times, particularly TTFB, in a platform like Shopify can be challenging due to the shared infrastructure and limited control over server-side configurations. However, Snocks was determined to work within these constraints to deliver the best possible experience for their customers.
Solution
Speed Kit provided Snocks with the ideal solution for reducing load times and enhancing page responsiveness. With Speed Kit’s predictive preloading capabilities, Snocks could anticipate user navigation patterns, loading essential content in advance. This approach reduced TTFB to under 100 milliseconds, ensuring that pages loaded almost instantaneously for users. Additionally, Speed Kit's optimization brought an impressive 1.2-second improvement in LCP across the entire site and a 1.4-second improvement specifically on product and category pages.
Snocks also worked closely with their A/B testing partner, Drip Agency, to verify these performance gains. Speed Kit’s unique compatibility with A/B testing allowed Snocks to accurately measure the impact of these optimizations in real time. This rigorous testing confirmed Speed Kit’s substantial performance improvements across key customer journeys, from product browsing to checkout.
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.
-min.webp)
Click the image to open the architectual diagram of Speed Kit with AWS
Results
Through Speed Kit, Snocks achieved remarkable gains in website performance:
- 1.2 s faster LCP overall: Reduced loading times site-wide, with up to 53% relative improvement, for a seamless user experience.
- 1.4 s faster LCP on product and category pages: Critical pages loaded faster, increasing user engagement.
- Under 100 ms TTFB: Predictive preloads ensured near-instant page responsiveness, setting a new standard for speed.
