Introduction
Hawesko is one of Germany’s best-known names in premium wine, standing for fine vintages, champagnes and a carefully curated range built over decades. Through its online shop, hawesko.de, the company serves thousands of customers each day who explore an extensive assortment across many category and product detail pages. For a wine shop of this scale, the speed of category and product pages is decisive: this is exactly where shoppers decide whether to keep browsing or drop off. On image-rich overview and detail pages, every additional second of load time adds friction to the path to purchase. To live up to its customers’ expectations, Hawesko introduced Speed Kit — with the aim of speeding up page delivery and making the shopping experience noticeably smoother, without touching the existing tech stack.
"For a wine shop, the moment between a category page and a product page is where the sale is won or lost — and that moment has to feel instant. Speed Kit made our category and product pages noticeably quicker, and the A/B test shows in plain numbers that this speed converts into more orders and more revenue. Best of all, it slotted into our setup without a single change to our existing stack."
Challenge
With a continually growing assortment and a high proportion of image-heavy category and product detail pages, Hawesko wanted to clearly improve the load times of these core browsing surfaces — without reworking the shop architecture and without extra development effort.
Solution
Speed Kit was added as a lightweight optimization layer that sits on top of the existing shop — no architectural changes required. At its heart is predictive preloading: it anticipates which pages a visitor is most likely to open next and quietly loads them in the background. As a result, a large share of follow-up pages is served directly from cache or fully pre-rendered before the click. The payoff is a distinctly faster browsing experience — above all when moving between category and product detail pages, where speed drives dwell time and conversion.
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
Predictive Preloading Coverage
Performance Improvements - Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
During the PoC-phase, Speed Kit produced substantial LCP gains — most pronounced on the category and product detail pages, the shop’s central browsing and decision surfaces.
Business Impact - A/B Test: Conversion Rate Analysis
Speed Kit ran a PoC-test-phase over two weeks: a Speed Kit-accelerated group was measured directly against an unaccelerated control group.
Revenue: +3.26% (relative, between groups)
User conversion rate: +1.73% (relative)
Transactions / orders: +1.72% (relative)
Average order value: +1.52% (relative)
Statistical significance: the +1.73% relative uplift in user conversion rate is statistically significant at a 90% confidence level (p ≈ 7.3%). The improvement is not attributable to random variation.
Conclusion
For Hawesko, page speed translates straight into commercial results. By cutting Largest Contentful Paint on the pivotal category pages by 377 ms (~43%) and on product detail pages by 129 ms (~17%), and by preloading a large share of follow-up pages, browsing the range becomes noticeably smoother. The PoC-phase makes the business impact unmistakable: a +1.73% relative uplift in user conversion rate and a +3.26% relative revenue uplift — statistically significant at a 90% confidence level. Speed Kit is now a permanent part of Hawesko’s performance stack, ensuring every visitor enjoys a faster, seamless shopping experience.
