How VBS Hobby made its online shop 67% faster with Speed Kit
Published on September 25, 2026
- Hobby & Leisure
- Europe
- Custom
+2.59%
Relative uplift in user conversion rate during the PoC phase
67%
Faster Largest Contentful Paint on accelerated pages
81%
Of next pages preloaded before the click
“Many of our products come in dozens of colours, and those pages used to take forever to load. With Speed Kit it simply feels faster.”
Introduction
VBS Hobby has supplied craft and hobby materials since 1964 and is today one of Europe's largest specialist mail-order suppliers in its field, with 16,000 products and more than 750,000 regular customers. Its busiest months run from autumn to Christmas.
Challenge
Many products at VBS Hobby have dozens of variants. One acrylic paint alone is sold in around fifty shades of yellow, and its product page has to load all of them, which makes pages like this slow. An earlier front-end clean-up had fixed the worst problems, but the Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console were still poor. The nine country shops run on a licensed shop system without a CDN, and shop updates ship every six to eight weeks.
Solution
Speed Kit runs on top of the existing shop and required no change to its architecture. It works out which page a visitor is likely to open next and prepares it in the background, so that page is often already complete in the browser by the time the customer clicks.
Results
Business Impact — PoC Phase: During the PoC phase, half of the visitors got Speed Kit and the other half, the control group, did not. The Speed Kit group reached a 2.59% higher conversion rate, and add-to-cart rose by 2.89%.
Performance Improvements — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Across all accelerated pages, the main content reaches the customer 67% faster. On product pages, the ones with all the variants, it is 72% faster.
Predictive Preloading Coverage: Speed Kit prepares the next page before the customer clicks: 81% of next pages are cached before the users visit them, and 53% of users get a page that was prerendered in the background.
Conclusion
Product pages with dozens of variants were the slowest part of the shop. With Speed Kit, main content on www.vbs-hobby.com loads 67% faster, 81% of next pages are cached before the click, and during the PoC phase the Speed Kit group converted at a 2.59% higher rate. Speed Kit runs on the existing shop and is now live in production.
