How EMP made its Salesforce Commerce Cloud storefront 50% faster with Speed Kit
- Fashion
- Europe
- Salesforce
50%
Faster Largest Contentful Paint on the pages Speed Kit accelerates
46%
Of navigations on accelerated pages open instantly, with an LCP under 300 ms
+2.98%
Relative uplift in user conversion rate during the PoC phase
“I'm very happy that we've got such good results. I always know that a faster page that is directly there makes a big uplift, and it's great to have the numbers here in black and white.”
Introduction
EMP was founded in 1986 by fans for fans and describes itself as Europe's number one e-commerce company for rock and entertainment merchandise. Its shops offer more than 25,000 items, from band merchandise to movie, TV and gaming merch and alternative fashion, and ship to 17 European countries. The PoC ran on emp.de, the German shop and EMP's domain with the most traffic. With Speed Kit, the accelerated pages now show their main content 50% faster, and during the PoC phase the user conversion rate rose by 2.98% compared to the control group.
Challenge
EMP runs its shops on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with personalised content on the storefront and on product pages, prices that can differ from visitor to visitor, and a premium programme, the Backstage Club. Before Speed Kit, visitors often saw a blank page or a loading spinner before the finished page appeared. Making the shop faster by hand would have meant working through the shop templates one by one. At the same time, EMP releases every week, runs several A/B tests in parallel and has its own analysts evaluate every test, so a speed-up could not be allowed to interfere with the tests already running.
Solution
Speed Kit runs on top of the existing storefront and required no change to its architecture. It works out which page a visitor is likely to open next and prepares it in the background, so the next product or category page is often already complete when the customer clicks. For the PoC phase, half of the visitors on emp.de got Speed Kit and the other half formed the control group, and EMP's data team received the raw data for its own analysis.
Results
Performance Improvements — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): On the pages Speed Kit accelerates, the main content now reaches the visitor 50% faster. Product pages gained 59%, category pages 48% and the homepage 18%. Without Speed Kit, no navigation on these pages reached an LCP under 300 ms. With Speed Kit, 46% did, and Time to First Byte fell by 86%.
Business Impact — PoC Phase: During the PoC phase, the Speed Kit group reached a 2.98% higher user conversion rate than the control group and placed 2.98% more orders. Visitors with Speed Kit also viewed 4.22% more pages.
Conclusion
With Speed Kit, the accelerated pages on emp.de show their main content 50% faster, and almost every second navigation now opens instantly. During the PoC phase, the Speed Kit group converted 2.98% better than the control group.
