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.
"On Magento 2, every extra script and template adds load time to exactly the pages our customers spend the most time on. What convinced us about Speed Kit is that it sits on top of our store — no changes to the Magento backend or theme, integrated in two lines of JavaScript — and the PoC proved in hard numbers that the added speed lifts our conversion rate. For an IT team, that combination of zero stack risk and a measurable result is exactly what you want."
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.
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 on the Magento 2 storefront — most pronounced on the category and product detail pages, the shop's central browsing and decision surfaces.
Business Impact - PoC Phase: Conversion Rate Analysis
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.
