.avif)
Introduction
ZWILLING J. A. Henckels AG is one of the largest and oldest manufacturers of kitchen knives and has a long standing tradition of delivering superb quality made in Germany. The product portfolio is complemented by cookware, cutlery as well as kitchenware and BBQ products. While operating thousands of retail stores across the world, the online store has developed into one of the most important sales channels. Delivering consistently great user experience and fast web performance is a big challenge on a global scale, yet it is essential to SEO ranking and commercial success.
"Speed Kit is a great page speed tool for our online store. It helps us in a completely new area of improvements. In our long-term collaboration we have proven that shorter loading times lead to improved business metrics including a sizeable increase in revenue."
Challenge
Solution
The implementation of Speed Kit delivered significant improvements across all technical page speed metrics, thanks to unique caching algorithms based on browser and cloud technology. This means the implementation is plug and play, minimally invasive, and the effects can be A/B-tested. Furthermore, this unique approach enables the acceleration of highly dynamic websites that otherwise cannot be cached in a classical sense.
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
To quantify what the improvements in technical speed metrics like Time to First Byte or Largest Contentful Paint mean for business success, the Speed Kit team has performed a long-term A/B test to gain statistically significant data about the effects of an improved user experience.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):
Firstly, the faster page speed led to reduced bounce rate and more page views per session. This lead to more transactions and a higher conversion rate. Furthermore, the improved page speed also led to an increased average basket size, leading to a total revenue uplift of 4.8%.
Relative Improvements:
