JD Williams has cut page load times for its website by more than a quarter, thanks to front-end optimisation technology.
When the Manchester-based plus-sized clothing specialist found that page load times were hitting five seconds, it looked for a solution that would help it reduce page response times – and improve the customer experience. Page load times were slowing as customers turned to tablet computers and smartphones to access the site, while at the same time image sizes were growing ever larger.
“Engagement and conversion rates are affected by the speed in which a website responds to the customer,” said Neil McGowan, IT director for JD Williams, which is part of the N Brown Group of home shopping companies. “As content gets more complex the technical challenge increases and website performance degrades. If we can’t serve up a page quick enough, our chance to convert a browser to a buyer diminishes rapidly.
“With web pages load times increasing to around five seconds we were interested in finding a solution to address this problem.”
Some 40% of visitors accessing the site now do so from mobile devices, so JD Williams also looked for a solution that could accelerate pages for mobile. It identified front-end optimisation as the way to achieve the improvement it needed, and chose Radware to deliver that.
“After making our initial assessment, we made several recommendations on what could enhance the experience with JD Williams for both the mobile and desktop user,” said Kent Alstad, vice president of acceleration at load balancing specialist Radware.
“In a few days, we were able to implement a simple and highly effective solution that reduced the number of server requests per page and response payload which in turn, shaved over two seconds off its page load time.”
The out-of-the-box solution has also enabled JD Williams to reduce server requests per page and response payload which in turn, enables higher conversion rates, more revenues and increased customer satisfaction.
“This is great technology which has enabled us to deliver top-quartile website response time performance, for media-rich web applications accessed through smartphones and tablets,” said McGowan.
