Introduction
Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof has a long lasting history and is synonymous for department stores within the German market. However, not just since the pandemic crisis of 2020, Galeria has understood that ecommerce is an attractive growth market for them. In a recently published interview with a large German newspaper, CEO Miguel Müllenbach has argued that in the past Galeria has been too slow and old-fashioned in this perspective. To tackle these issues, Galeria has identified web performance as a key success factor.
"Speed Kit has delivered a clearly noticeable performance increase for our online shop. The ecommerce business is an essential growth market for Galeria with high strategic importance. With Speed Kit, the whole topic around performance is taken care of and thus it is one less thing to worry about for us."
Solution
Speed Kit is a plug and play approach to solving web performance issues straight out of the box. Based on the service worker technology and implemented via JavaScript, Speed Kit is compatible to all websites. Hence, Speed Kit was easily integrated into the Salesforce Commerce Cloud stack of galeria.de. The Speed Kit team has built a customized configuration of Speed Kit to get the most out of an otherwise slow shop system. Another perk that the Speed Kit service worker offers is an offline mode that notifies the user of an connectivity issue and keeps the user engaged nevertheless.
Results
Unlike any performance tool on the market, Speed Kit can be A/B-tested. The results are showing with statistical significance that all relevant performance metrics have greatly improved. The number of page views with a First Contentful Paint (FCP) below one second has increased by 125%.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):
Furthermore, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) has improved significantly, which is an essential factor of the Google Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics established by Google that play a critical role not only for user experience but also for the organic search ranking.
