Problem
Delivering on a promise
Speed is absolutely critical to the Ingram Micro Services business model, but their website wasn’t delivering on that same brand promise. They knew that their Core Web Vitals metrics needed improvement, and were progressive in addressing the poor user experience and potential negative SEO penalties resulting from poor site speed. They knew their website was slow. A handful of different “website performance scan” tools were telling them a dozen different metrics across hundreds of pages, but they had no idea where to begin. They also had no idea how much slower they were than their competitors—massive, household names with shops on every corner.
Without in-house expertise, Ingram didn’t have the team or processes required to tackle this challenge alone. Uncertainty was high. They needed a trusted partner to show them the way. SpeedSense was hired to identify and prioritize specific, actionable tasks for website speed improvement.
Approach
The tech behind performance
The project kicked off with a site speed audit—a thorough and exhaustive analysis, which surfaced a number of opportunities.
First, there was unnecessary javascript running on the homepage, which was hurting initial rendering and interactivity. As well, a YouTube player was embedded inside a hidden dropdown menu, which could never be played without prior interaction. This was easily resolved by replacing the player with a facade and lazy-loading the third-party javascript. Google Analytics was also firing late, causing the business-critical data they were collecting to be inaccurate—it was confusing the actual behavior of their users.
Ingram Micro Services’s initial concerns were validated: a number of competitors had faster websites, which served as the new target benchmark.
Solution
A clear path forward
Once we completed our initial audit we were able to give Ingram's leadership precise site speed targets based on their competitive landscape. In addition, their marketing department knew exactly where on the site to begin optimization for maximum improvement. Ingram Micro Service’s developers were empowered to tackle the highest-impact, and quickest wins for their site speed, along with a prioritized backlog of tasks to address over time.
With that, the team set out on a couple of sprints of implementation, and then re-engaged SpeedSense to measure the impact and ROI.
