How RidersDeal lifted its conversion rate by +2.33% with Speed Kit

Introduction

RidersDeal is one of Europe's go-to online shops for equestrian and riding enthusiasts, with a broad assortment of riding apparel, horse equipment and stable essentials built up over years. Through ridersdeal.com — built on Magento 2 — the company serves thousands of riders each day who browse an extensive catalogue across many category and product detail pages. 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 — typical of a feature-rich Magento 2 storefront — every additional second of load time adds friction to the path to purchase. To live up to its customers' expectations, RidersDeal introduced Speed Kit — with the aim of speeding up page delivery and making the shopping experience noticeably smoother, without touching its existing Magento 2 stack.

Challenge

Like many feature-rich Magento 2 storefronts, ridersdeal.com carries a lot of weight on its category and product detail pages — extensions, third-party scripts and image-heavy templates that slow down the very pages shoppers spend the most time on. RidersDeal wanted to clearly improve the load times of these core browsing surfaces — without re-platforming, reworking the Magento theme, or adding development effort on the Magento side.

Solution

Speed Kit was added as a lightweight optimization layer that sits on top of the existing Magento 2 store — no architectural changes, no Magento backend or theme rework, integrated via two lines of JavaScript. 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 — while Magento 2 keeps running exactly as before.

Results

During the PoC phase, Speed Kit produced substantial LCP gains on the Magento 2 storefront — most pronounced on the category and product detail pages, the shop's central browsing and decision surfaces.

Speed Kit ran a PoC test phase over two weeks on the Magento 2 store: a Speed Kit-accelerated group was measured directly against an unaccelerated control group. Revenue was not part of this PoC's measurement — the focus was the effect of speed on conversion and browsing depth.

• User conversion rate: +2.33% (relative)
• Page impressions: +2.07% (relative)

Statistical significance: the +2.33% relative uplift in user conversion rate is statistically significant at a 90% confidence level. The improvement is not attributable to random variation.

Conclusion

For RidersDeal, page speed translates straight into a better-converting store. By cutting Largest Contentful Paint on enabled pages by 377 ms (~43%) — with the steepest gains on the product and listing pages — and by preloading a large share of follow-up pages, browsing the catalogue becomes noticeably smoother, all while the Magento 2 store runs unchanged. The PoC phase makes the business impact unmistakable: a +2.33% relative uplift in user conversion rate — statistically significant at a 90% confidence level. Speed Kit is now a permanent part of RidersDeal's Magento 2 performance stack, ensuring every visitor enjoys a faster, seamless shopping experience.