AVON Deutschland

Challenge “Google Pagespeed Race”

The internet beauty queen gets a performance boost.

130 years ago a clever sales person for perfume decided to sell a wiff of happiness door to door. That idea lead to the founding of an imperium and Avon beauty consultants became the most famous representatives of beauty.

But where do they get their expert opinion? From the established beauty knowledge platform www.avon-blog.de

Kreation / Programmatic & Social Advertising / SEA / nfx Tools / Data & Tracking

Problem

It ́s time to perform (better).

Many AVON ladies and AVON aficionados use the AVON beauty knowledge platform on a daily basis. Due to new content, little opimized pictures and the underlying CMS, the site-performance decreased measurably.

We could prove this decrease using the following tools:

Pagespeed Insights
Webpagetest.org
Lighthouse

Idea

What changed?

Google had the perfect timing and invited us to participate in the „PagespeedRace“ along with 25 other agencies. netzeffekt went into the race with the nickname „WhiteChameleon“ (nickname was issued by Google).

Over 6 weeks Google calculated the scores of the pages (homepage, category and article) daily and finally determined the best absolut increase of scores.

To improve the performance, we took the following actions:

Calculation of scores for our internal record keeping, using Pagespeed, Wepagetest and Lighthouse. (Note: Results of Pagespeed Insight can vary quite drastically. We recommend measuring several times and useing an arithmetic average.

Optimisation webserver/nginx
- Optimisation gzip-Settings
- Optimisation of cache settings
- fine tuning of opcache
- Specific setting of location rules for cache handling

CMS
- W3C Total Cache Plugin with modules:
  - HTML Minify
  - JS Minify
  - CSS Minify
- W3C Total Cache Plugin with modules:
  - Page Cache
  - Database Cache
  - Object Cache

Frontend

Manual optimisation of all theme pictures
Replacement of slow home sliders by more efficient and performant propietary slider
Conversion and delivery in WebP format for pictures uploaded by users. (if browser support is available)

Result

We are able to significantly improve the page speed scores. This also effects the user experience, who can load the page faster.
We also were able win first place with our client AVON in the speed race!

From our point of view, it is extremely important, to ensure that images are ready in the correct formats as well as already compressed/optimized (WebP). This is especially vital for platforms with dynamically growing content.

This in combination with slim Javascript, well-adjusted cache handling and a balanced web server contributes to a very solid performance of these kind of platforms.

Martin Kydd on netzeffekt

“We are happy to have a partner in netzeffekt who knows how to combine the challenge of a dynamically growing platform with the demands of high performance while not losing sight of the demands of users in terms of design and usability.”

Yeah!

In the race for the top position on Google, the speed of the platform is an important success factor in addition to relevant and high-quality content. A smart combination of content, brand, performance and analytics with a strong, dedicated team creates great things at AVON Germany.