COOK Increases Conversions By Seven Percent Thanks to Faster Load Time

COOK is a growing business that provides high-quality frozen meals, and came to Eggplant with two questions:

“How is our website’s speed affecting our business?”
“How can we improve it?”

Combining data from Real Customer Insights (RCI) and Monitoring Insights, Eggplant helped COOK improve load times by almost a second. RCI was then able to show how this improvement increased conversion rate by 7%, cut bounce rate by 7% and increased customer engagement by 10%.

With Eggplant’s help, we’re uncovering and fixing the things that are slowing down our website. And having a faster website is already making a positive impact on our business, with better conversion rates and lower bounce rates. I can highly recommend Eggplant’s products and expertise.”

— James Walker, Head of Technology

Challenge

COOK suspected that slow load times were negatively affecting its business but couldn’t prove it. It needed a reliable way to measure and analyze its website’s performance and to understand how performance was influencing customer behavior.

Solution

Eggplant worked with COOK to measure and improve the performance of its website. As part of this process, Eggplant set up Monitoring Insights and Real Customer Insights on the site.

During a routine review, Eggplant helped identify a significant performance issue on product pages: a server response time that could reach six seconds. COOK’s agency, Redspa, prioritized the issue and released a fix in a matter of days.

Results

The result was a marked improvement in response times, reflected in the Monitoring Insights data:

This improvement was reflected in the RCI data too, proving that user experiences had been positively affected by the release. Average page load time improved from 4.8s to 3.95s.

At the same time, COOK used RCI to see how the change in performance was affecting visitor behavior. This showed that COOK had achieved a seven-percent increase in conversion rate. At the same time, bounce rate fell by seven percent and engagement (pages per session) increased by 10 percent.

After improving average load time by less than a second, COOK achieved a 7% increase in conversion rate, a 7% fall in bounce rate and a 10% increase in engagement.”

These improvements were also very close to what Eggplant’s RCI solution had predicted.

The Performance Impact Prediction feature in RUM draws on a customer’s data to estimate the effects of performance improvements.

It takes all the data about visits to the website and builds a model of the relationship between performance and visitor behavior. Enter a new, improved load time, and it will predict changes in conversions, bounce rate and revenue for your entire population or individual segments (e.g. Android users).

The end result for COOK was a faster website that delivers a better user experience and improved KPIs.