Challenge
Black Friday is a critical period for any online business. In 2018, frenzied holiday shoppers broke all records by spending $6.22 billion in online sales, creating traffic that pushed some online stores to breaking point. Just ask Coyuchi, a San Francisco-based home textile company that is committed to making environmentally-friendly home goods. On previous Black Fridays, Coyuchi has offered up to 40 percent off the price of pure organic cotton bed sheets, creating a stampede among their eco-loving customers.
Solution
First, Atwix delivered a detailed performance audit. Like a mechanic peering under the hood of a car, we immediately identified the issues slowing down page load speeds and impacting the website’s reliability. Then we implemented various solutions. We added a new cron job (a time-based job scheduler) to clean the log table, which was too heavy; we enabled JS bundling and HTML minimization; added a cache warmer; optimized Coyuchi’s images, and implemented a weekly relic review. Finally, we fixed the store’s Varnish configurations, reducing page load times from 600-700 milliseconds to just 180-200 milliseconds. In case you’re wondering, Coyuchi’s pages now load faster than a blink of an eye.
Results
With a refactored legacy code and a redesign of several key pages, the Coyuchi webstore was soon running faster than ever. It was ready for anything. Black Friday 2018 was the real test for the updated system, and Coyuchi handled it effortlessly. During the sales season, the website suffered no performance issues under especially high loads, and the new features helped to display more relevant products to customers, creating record holiday sales revenue. The new, seamless Coyuchi customer experience delivered fantastic results: Mobile revenue increased by 50 percent; desktop conversion rose by 29 percent; and bounce rate dropped by an impressive 27 percent.
