Introduction
Hugendubel, one of Germany’s leading book retailers, has made its e-commerce business a central pillar of its growth strategy. With more customers discovering and purchasing books online, the performance of the digital storefront is more critical than ever.
Speed and responsiveness are no longer optional—they’re key to delivering a compelling user experience. To meet these demands, Hugendubel teamed up with Speed Kit to significantly accelerate its online shop and ensure a frictionless, high-performance experience for every visitor.
"Providing a fast and reliable online experience is a top priority for us—especially as digital plays an increasingly central role in how our customers interact with Hugendubel. Thanks to Speed Kit, we were able to noticeably boost performance across our shop with minimal technical effort. The rollout was smooth, and the collaboration with their team was efficient and solution-oriented."
Challenge
Solution
Hugendubel already leverages a high-performance Single-Page Application (SPA) stack to deliver a fast and modern shopping experience. To further enhance performance on the domains hugendubel.de and ebook.de, Speed Kit was implemented.
By caching dynamic content and intelligently preloading the most likely next steps in the customer journey, Speed Kit ensures even faster load times and a smoother browsing experience across devices and regions.
Key performance metrics such as Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) saw significant improvements, resulting in quicker pages, increased user engagement, and higher customer satisfaction.
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 Upflift
Our proof of concept with Hugendubel demonstrated a meaningful business impact, achieving a 4.37% increase in revenue and 2.82% more completed transactions. This result underscores Speed Kit’s effectiveness not only in significantly speeding up page loads but also in boosting user engagement and driving higher sales.
LCP on Category Pages
Page type category results for Hugendubel:
Our Proof of Concept with Hugendubel showcased significant enhancements in website performance, achieving an impressive 582ms improvement in Largest Contentful Paint on category pages—making them 45% faster. These results underscore Hugendubel’s commitment to delivering a superior user experience through dramatically accelerated page load times.
Closing Statement
At Hugendubel, performance is more than just technical metrics—it’s essential to maintaining a competitive edge. By utilizing Speed Kit, they have enhanced the customer experience from the very first interaction, providing a faster and smoother journey that reflects the quality and reliability of their brand.
