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Introduction
TITUS, Germany’s leading retailer for skateboarding gear, streetwear, and accessories, has been at the forefront of the European skateboarding scene since its founding in 1978. Named after its founder, Titus Dittmann, the company played a pivotal role in popularizing skateboarding in Germany, combining a passion for the sport with a commitment to growing the culture around it.
Julius Dittmann has been leading the brand since 2010, significantly advancing the internationalization of TITUS in Europe. Most recently, expanding it’s wings to Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan.
Over the years, TITUS has done more than just sell products – it actively shapes skateboarding culture through events, contests, and sponsorships of top athletes. With 21 skateshops across Germany and a growing online presence, TITUS continues to be a hub for skateboarding enthusiasts of all levels.
"Skating fast, being in the flow, feeling the adrenaline rushing through your veins – is indescribable. Getting as close as possible to this experience is what every modern webshop should aim for. Loading speed is critical.
By migrating to Shopify we established a great base – but there is room for more. In order to reach the very top tier – Speed Kit is the key factor to set you apart in a competitive online environment.
TITUS has been working with the Speed Kit team since several years and highly values their expertise. We were blown away on how their innovate solutions elevate our speed and performance even further – to the highest standards.
The Integration is smooth – allowing us to fully benefit from their AI-powered solution, custom-built for our specific Shopify setup."
Challenge
In response to growing customer demand for a faster and more reliable online shopping experience, TITUS transitioned their shop system to Shopify. However, they recognized that simply moving to a new platform wasn’t enough to reach the level of performance their brand demanded.
To fully achieve their ambitious goals, TITUS sought a strategic partnership with Speed Kit, whose advanced optimization technologies provided the missing piece to truly elevate their site performance and user experience.
Solution
Speed Kit enabled TITUS to achieve its performance goals by integrating its advanced, AI-driven web optimization features into the newly adopted Shopify platform. By leveraging Speed Kit’s predictive preload and pre-rendering technologies, which utilize machine learning to anticipate user behavior, TITUS was able to drastically reduce load times by preloading content before users even clicked.
This approach provided near-instant page loads, ensuring a smooth and engaging browsing experience across all devices. The integration was seamless, making full use of Shopify's flexibility while significantly boosting site performance across key metrics.
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
Instant navigations through predictive pre-rendering
Although TITUS already experienced a substantial improvement in performance after migrating to Shopify, Speed Kit pushed their site to even higher levels. In line with TITUS's web performance strategy, which incorporates AI-driven enhancements, Speed Kit's AI-powered predictive preloads made a significant impact. Speed Kit was able to correctly predict 80% of all product page navigations, and out of those, 40% of pages were instantly pre-rendered, offering a seamless user experience.
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As a result of these new features, Speed Kit made a significant impact on the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — a key performance metric that measures the time it takes for the largest visual element of a page to load, directly influencing user perception of site speed. Verified through a clean A/B test, Speed Kit improved the LCP by 31%, reducing it from 794 ms to 546 ms in the median, compared to the already optimized stock Shopify performance.
In addition, and according to the official Google Chrome User Experience Report, TITUS even surpassed amazon.de in LCP performance, placing them in the highest league of European online shops for speed and user experience. With Speed Kit, TITUS has reached the pinnacle of web performance, surpassing even the biggest names in e-commerce and ensuring that their customers enjoy a best-in-class online experience.
