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Introduction
Illy is one of the world's most recognised premium coffee brands, sold in more than 140 countries and known for its signature blend and design-led experience. Through www.illy.com — built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud — the brand offers its coffee, machines and capsules to customers across many markets. For a 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 extra second of load time adds friction to the path to purchase. To live up to its customers' expectations, Illy introduced Speed Kit — to speed up page delivery and make the shopping experience noticeably smoother, without touching its existing stack.
"Speed is a core part of the digital experience we want to give our customers. Speed Kit made www.illy.com noticeably faster on exactly the pages that matter most — and the PoC proved, with statistical significance, that this speed lifts our conversion rate. It integrated on top of our existing platform without disruption, which made the decision an easy one."
Challenge
With image-rich category and product pages and traffic across many markets, Illy wanted to clearly improve the load times of its core browsing surfaces — without re-platforming or adding development effort on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud side.
Solution
Speed Kit was added as a lightweight optimization layer that sits on top of the existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud store — no architectural changes, integrated without disruption. At its heart is predictive preloading: it anticipates which pages a visitor is most likely to open next and loads them in the background, so a large share of follow-up pages is served directly from cache or fully pre-rendered before the click. The result is a distinctly faster browsing experience — above all 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 product and category pages, the shop's central browsing and decision surfaces.
Enabled pages:
Product list page:
Product detail page:
Business Impact - PoC Phase: Conversion Rate Analysis
During the PoC phase, a Speed Kit-accelerated group was measured directly against an unaccelerated control group.
- User conversion rate: +2.96% (relative)
- Transactions / orders: +3.09% (relative)
Statistical significance: the +2.96% relative uplift in user conversion rate is statistically significant at a 95% confidence level (p ≈ 4.2%). The improvement is not attributable to random variation.
Conclusion
For Illy, page speed translates straight into a better-converting store. By cutting Largest Contentful Paint on enabled pages by 628 ms (~43%) — with the steepest gains on product detail pages — and by preloading the majority of follow-up pages, browsing becomes noticeably smoother, while the existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud store runs unchanged. During the PoC phase this produced a statistically significant +2.96% relative uplift in user conversion rate. Speed Kit is now part of Illy's performance stack, ensuring every visitor enjoys a faster, seamless experience.
