Introduction
DICTUM is one of Europe’s most respected specialist retailers for high-quality hand tools, materials, and knives — serving professionals and passionate craftspeople across woodworking, metalworking, instrument making, and beyond. Founded in 1848 in Markneukirchen by Johann Friedrich Dick, the company has spent more than 175 years bringing people, tools, and knowledge together. Today, headquartered in Plattling, Bavaria, DICTUM operates under the motto: “More than tools.”
DICTUM’s product portfolio spans thousands of carefully curated items - from Japanese saws and hand planes to premium kitchen knives, sculptural tools, garden equipment, and surface treatment materials. A large share of products is developed and manufactured under DICTUM’s own brands, including the storied Herdim® label, reflecting the company’s deep commitment to craftsmanship at every level. Customers can explore products in dedicated shops in Munich and Plattling, or attend hands-on workshops where DICTUM’s specialists share their expertise directly.
"We had high expectations going into the test, and Speed Kit delivered on every one of them. The performance gains across our product and listing pages were significant, and seeing a measurable uplift in conversion rate confirmed what we suspected: speed genuinely matters to our customers. The collaboration was smooth, professional, and clearly focused on outcomes."
Challenge
As DICTUM’s e-commerce presence has grown into a primary channel for a broad international audience, the performance of dictum.com has become central to the brand experience. For a customer base that values precision, quality, and attention to detail, a slow or unresponsive online shop is simply at odds with what DICTUM represents. Every extra second of load time risks undermining the trust and enthusiasm that bring craftspeople to DICTUM in the first place.
To close this gap - and to ensure that the digital experience matches the quality of the products it showcases - DICTUM partnered with Speed Kit. The goal: deliver near-instant page loads across the entire storefront, from product listings to search results, reinforcing DICTUM’s reputation as a place where excellence is the standard.
Solution
DICTUM operates a sophisticated, high-traffic e-commerce platform running on Shopware 6. Serving a broad international audience of craftspeople, professionals, and enthusiasts. With a deep product catalogue spanning thousands of carefully selected tools and materials, fast and reliable navigation is essential — customers expect to find, evaluate, and purchase with ease.
Speed Kit was integrated into dictum.com to deliver near-instant page transitions across all page types. By intelligently caching dynamic content and proactively preloading the most likely next steps in the customer journey, Speed Kit moves pages from the server to the browser before the user even clicks — resulting in load times that feel immediate.
Core metrics including Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) all improved significantly across product pages, category listings, search results, and the homepage. The result is a measurably better experience for every visitor - on desktop and mobile alike.
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.
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Click the image to open the architectual diagram of Speed Kit with AWS
Results
Business Uplift
The A/B test delivered a clear and measurable business impact: Speed Kit achieved a 6.96% increase in conversion rate on dictum.com. This result underlines that the performance improvements driven by Speed Kit translate directly into commercial outcomes - faster pages mean more customers completing their purchases.
Beyond conversion, the speed impact analysis reveals a strong correlation between faster LCP and deeper engagement: every 100 ms improvement in LCP translates to a 0.78% improvement in session length. With Speed Kit delivering approximately 880 ms faster LCP overall, this equates to a 6.8% improvement in session length - meaning customers browse deeper into the catalogue and spend more time discovering DICTUM’s product range.
70% of Traffic Loading Within 1 Second
One of the most striking results of the A/B test is the share of page impressions that now load with an LCP under 1 second. With Speed Kit enabled, 70% of sessions experience page loads within 1 second — a dramatic shift compared to the control group. This means the vast majority of DICTUM’s visitors now encounter a near-instant browsing experience, rather than waiting for content to render. The LCP distribution across enabled pages shifts sharply to the left, with the Speed Kit curve peaking early and trailing off well before the original group’s performance plateau.
LCP Improvements by Page Type
Speed Kit delivered substantial LCP improvements across all major page types on dictum.com:
Closing Statement
For DICTUM, performance is an expression of craftsmanship - the same attention to precision that defines every tool in the catalogue should be felt in the digital experience as well. By integrating Speed Kit, DICTUM has ensured that visitors to dictum.com encounter a shop that is as sharp, responsive, and well-made as the products it sells.
With a 6.96% conversion rate uplift, 70% of traffic now loading within one second, LCP improvements of over 800 ms across key page types, and a measurable uplift in session depth, the results demonstrate that Speed Kit delivers exactly what DICTUM’s discerning customer base deserves: a fast, seamless, and professional online experience - from the very first click.
