What To Do With a 9s Page Load?

(Decorist : 9/18-12/19)

Challenge

Inherited a two-fold challenge: 1) less-than-optimal user experience of 9.01s Avg. Page Load Speed and 2) a culture that did not yet value performance engineering.

Action

Idenfitied initial frontend and backend low-hanging fruit (e.g. page structure, image resolutions, N+1 queries, lazy-loading, etc.) Identifed and delegated KRs to FE leads. Introduced process to methodically follow up each week, pressing the case for performance engineering over months.

Below, a sampling …

Some initial efforts shaved ~3s of the Homepage:

Lighthouse score soared from 5 to 61:

There were multiple speed improvements of up to 50% on various pages across the site as a result of backend query improvements and a +300% bump YoY in SEO traffic (verified by 3rd party SEO consultant)

After Dec 2019, we shifted focus to non-converted UXes after having addressed low-hanging fruit for all UXes.

Results

• Record Avg. Site Page Load Speed of prevous four years : 9.03s (Sep 2018) to 4.13s (Dec 2019.)