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carreblanc

 

Carré Blanc aims at an optimal user experience whatever the sales channel. On its E-commerce platform, the speed of the web pages is part of the quality criteria for this retailer which increased its conversions by 25% by improving its loading times.

 

Market
Furniture - Decoration

Traffic
2M page views per month

Conversions
+25%

CMS
Magento


Context

Carré Blanc is a household linen brand in business since 1985. Its network of 150 bricks-and-mortar shops is made up of one third franchises, one third affiliates, and one third corporate-owned shops.

The company made its move towards digital technology in 2012 with the creation of an e-commerce platform that allowed the brand to transition from wholesale to retail and venture into omnichannel sales, particularly with services like e-reservation, click & collect, in-shop tablets, and more.

On average, the brand’s website receives 220,000 unique visitors every month, and up to 400,000 during peak traffic periods. It also receives a monthly average of 2 million page views, which goes up to 3.6 million during peak traffic periods.

A visit to the website precedes 75% of in-shop purchases and the digital channel represented about 10% of the company’s revenues in 2019. That share has since grown.

Additionally, the e-commerce website saw significant growth in 2020, driven by major marketing investments and increased visibility, creating a flow that naturally benefits the network of shops.

The goal of the digital team is to keep growing the e-commerce website and to strengthen the synergy between the physical shops and the e-commerce platform: the idea is to activate all conversion mechanisms, both in-shop and online.


Goals

To overcome the limits of an ageing technical solution (Magento 1.9), Carré Blanc turned to Fasterize to support marketing and sales efforts by offering a fast and fluid interface for online customers.

The loading times registered on certain strategic pages were particularly long, notably on the homepage and certain category pages. The digital team took action to accelerate the loading of web pages, estimating that conversions would improve by at least 0.2%—a threshold that was easily exceeded!

Our platform relies on a technical foundation that has seen better days. Since our revamp project, it is now much faster and is able to keep up, and it’s all thanks to Fasterize

Charlotte Martourey - Digital Director

Deployment

First, the Customer Success Engineer who assists the Carré Blanc teams gave a presentation of the tool and of the technical specifications so that each person involved in the project would be aware of the tasks to be handled.
Then, he sent acceptance testing requirements, before moving on to full deployment of Fasterize, all in less than a month.

Mobilising two in-house people and two people from their service provider agency, the process was fast and didn’t require any changes to the website’s source code.


Support

Since deployment of the solution, the dedicated Customer Success Engineer has sent a performance tracker every quarter and he regularly communicates with the website’s technical specialist, the front-end developer, the web designer, and others.

All of Carré Blanc’s teams especially appreciate that Fasterize is constantly attentive and offers solutions adapted to any level of technical need.

Fasterize is much more than a tool! In addition to the SaaS solution, which helps us accelerate our website and supports our platform, we get support from high-level experts who assist us with optimising our performance. We also benefit from a transparent tool that’s easy to use, with a provider who is always attentive and responds to any issue. For example, I really like that I can activate and deactivate the features one by one. We can also perform tests and make adjustments, particularly to the different cache layers. It’s reassuring to feel independent and, at the same time, supported for all skill-development needs.

Charlotte Martourey - Digital Director

Since implementation of the SaaS solution, I have been in regular contact with the Carré Blanc teams and their service provider agency. Our discussions are always constructive and we are all moving in the same direction to boost performance of the e-commerce site.

Romain Thierry - Customer Success Engineer, Fasterize

Results

Since the implementation of Fasterize, Carré Blanc has seen a 25% increase in their number of users and +31% in page views.

In spite of the strong increase in web traffic in 2020, the e-commerce platform’s speed held steady and the bounce rates even went down slightly. Meanwhile, conversion rates increased by 25% and revenues by 50%!

In terms of speed indicators, the greatest improvement was recorded for the “time to first byte”—a metric tracked by Carré Blanc for improving SEO.

 

  • Desktop
    • Speed Index -49% (as much as -66% on the homepage)
    • Start Render -42%
    • Time To First Byte -68%
  • Mobile
    • Speed Index -33%
    • Start Render -35%
    • Time To First Byte -60% (as much as ~ -80% on product pages)

 

For even more feedback from our customers, and all the details on their business, technical and SEO gains,
discover our Success Stories
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