Leading North American home services company

Page Speed Optimization & Improved User Experience

Introduction

Architech was tasked to reduce the page load time and improve the overall user experience for a leading North American home services company. As of July 2018, Google started using page speed times as a ranking factor for its mobile search. This meant that fast page speeds were rewarded with higher SEO rankings while slow page speeds dropped. According to Google, for every second a customer is waiting for a web page to load, organizations lose approximately 19% of potential customers.

The Challenge

We were approached by the client’s Vice President of Marketing to enhance the performance of their website and the experience for their customers. With a large percentage of their customers visiting via mobile and the importance of mobile speed in relation to SEO and conversion, it was high. Our mandate was to decrease load time and enhance their overall Lighthouse score.

The Solution

To meet the overall objective of optimizing page speed and increasing conversion, we first conducted a UX audit of the client’s website. From the assessment, we determined a series of enhancements that would make improvements to their page speed and developed a prioritized roadmap to deliver on the overall objectives.
Four main Web Page Test metrics were employed as a guideline to ensure we measured against Google standards. These included load time, speed index, bytes-in, and the number of server requests. Examples of some of the optimizations we implemented to improve these metrics were:

Standardized and reduced the number of fonts loaded on the site.
Optimized and converted images to webP, a next-generation image format.
Reduced the number of requests to the server while also reducing the load time.
Optimized critical rendering paths.

The Results

As a result, we were able to reduce the client’s page load time by 54%. Optimizing the page speed with rigorous testing against industry standards resulted in significant advancements as the client has seen great improvements in customer experience and conversion.

54%

Improvement in loading speed on 3G

44%

Improvement in loading speed on 4G

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