Going from 5.7 seconds to 1.1 seconds, I achieved to load a product page more than 5 times faster on a mobile device and 3G connection.
Torfs want their e-commerce to compete with Zalando. To do so, they don't charge shipping costs. As a result of costs like this, their profit has halved, as can be read in this Dutch article about Torfs webshop profits.
Speed and conversion
Speed is already playing a role within ranking, but it is also affecting advertising costs. Moreover, it will impact user engagement and thus conversion.
This triggered me to make a proof of concept to determine how much faster Torfs product pages can become and how much money they are leaving on the table.
Pagespeed and user engagement
To achieve (early) user engagement, you want meaningful content to show up as early ass possible. To achieve this, I often focus on the First Meaningful Paint metric.
Going from 5.7 seconds to 1.1 seconds, I achieved to load a product page more than 5 times faster on a mobile device and 3G connection (-80%).
E-commerce revenue
As can be read in the article, Torfs profit in 2018 was 146.7 million euro's. Of all solds shoes, 17% is being sold via their webshop. Their online revenue could be around 25 million euro's.
Increase of revenue
Based on these numbers and researches by Google and Amazon, a 1 second win in loading time may increase conversion by 7%. As half of internet users nowadays are using mobile devices and half of them might be on 3G internet connection at time of writing, this could lead to 2,5 million of extra revenue.