How the BMW website loads 1.5x faster with Speed Kit

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) is one of the largest premium car manufacturers globally. Offering speed, agility, and a premium experience with the help of innovation, which is at the very core of BMW’s identity. However, providing a superb user experience on the web with fast loading times across a multitude of countries is a huge challenge. This involves taking into account numerous stakeholders as well as country-specific technical challenges.

Speed Kit uses the new service worker technology to apply innovative caching algorithms for faster delivery of both static assets and highly dynamic HTML. Speed Kit therefore massively reduces latency through consistent browser caching and global edge caches. As a result, Speed Kit solves the Time to First Byte (TTFB) bottleneck leading to faster rendering and a much improved user experience. In addition, Speed Kit also accelerates third-party services, optimizes the loading order of critical resources, and applies automatic image optimization.

Since Speed Kit is implemented via a JavaScript tag in the HTML template, the speed uplift can be A/B-tested. Through the use of real-user monitoring, we obtained statistically significant improvements across all web performance metrics.

‍

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP):

‍

The consistent uplift in the Google Core Web Vitals like the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) across all contintents confirmed a substantially improved user experience. Overall, Speed Kit saves 64% of unnecessary image data for over 196 million monthly images delivered to users.