Introduction
VAN GRAAF is an internationally recognized fashion retailer, known for offering a wide selection of premium brands and delivering high-quality customer service—both in-store and online.
As more of the customer journey shifts to digital, site speed and user experience have become key elements of the brand’s promise. To bring the same standard of service to its online store, VAN GRAAF partnered with Speed Kit to create a noticeably faster and more seamless shopping experience.
"At VAN GRAAF, delivering a premium shopping experience is at the core of our brand—both offline and online. With Speed Kit, we were able to significantly improve loading times without disrupting our operations. The integration was fast and straightforward, and the collaboration with the Speed Kit team was highly professional."
Challenge
Solution
VAN GRAAF implemented Speed Kit on www.vangraaf.com to boost site performance across various devices and regions. By caching dynamic content and smartly preloading the most probable next actions in the customer journey, Speed Kit delivered a noticeably faster and more seamless browsing experience.
Key web performance indicators like Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) saw substantial improvements, resulting in faster page loads, increased user engagement, and greater 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
Conversion Uplift
Our proof of concept with VAN GRAAF delivered a substantial business impact, showing a 7.53% increase in conversion rate. This outcome highlights Speed Kit’s ability not only to greatly improve page loading speeds but also to enhance user engagement and increase the number of completed transactions.
LCP on Product Detail Page
Our Proof of Concept with Van Graaf demonstrates impressive improvements in website performance, with a remarkable 910ms uplift in Largest Contentful Paint on Product Detail Pages (PDP), making them 57% faster. These results highlight Van Graaf's success in enhancing the user experience and significantly accelerating page loading times.
Conclusion
At Van Graaf, performance goes beyond technical measurements—it’s a key factor in staying ahead of the competition. By leveraging Speed Kit, they’ve improved the customer experience from the very first interaction, delivering a quicker and more seamless journey that truly represents the sophistication of their brand.
