Shoe Carnival Outperforms 98% of Sites with an Instant Website on Layer0
Results with Layer0:
92% reduction in browsing transitions
dropping from 6 seconds to 500ms
70.5% increase in first load speeds
dropping from 3.4 seconds to 1 second
Outperforms 98% of websites
and outranks Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom
40% lift in revenue
with a sub-second website
Increased enterprise agility
with Layer0
Shoe Carnival, one of the nation’s largest family footwear retailers, offers a broad assortment of dress, casual, and athletic brand name footwear for men, women and children. With 80% of the retailer’s traffic coming from mobile and a proprietary frontend that was both slow and challenging to develop for, Shoe Carnival was looking for a proper solution. The retailer found what it needed with advanced web tech for sub-second websites through Layer0 by Limelight and AWS.
“On Layer0, we have better speed and conversions. From a developer’s standpoint, we have far more flexibility and no restrictions.” – Tyler Drone, Sr. Manager of Digital Development
Instant-loading pages on Layer0
ShoeCarnival.com went from 3.4 second first-page loads and 6 second browsing transitions to both being 1 second or less. On Layer0, first loads are 70.5% faster, with a 1 second median load time. More importantly, subsequent page loads are cut by an astonishing 92%, down to 500ms.
“The speed was so much faster than a lot of the things that we were comparing it to. This was unique to this platform (Layer0).” – Drone
Layer0 makes instant loads possible every time, with little to no developmental headache. “The platform is more flexible, user friendly, and takes all the guesswork out of deployments and caching,” stated Drone. Shoe Carnival has full control over caching and traffic routing on Layer0. This, along with the platform’s CDN-as-JavaScript, which caches dynamic content at the edge and streams it to the browser before it is requested, ensures that ShoeCarnival.com delivers an exceptional, instant experience.
The bottom-line gains from the sub-second speeds were felt immediately. “Right away, we saw lift in conversions and AOV,” reported Drone. Since launching on Layer0, ShoeCarnival.com has seen a 35% increase in conversion rate and 40% rise in revenue. Speed equals money, but that’s not all it influences. Site speed also influences SEO.
Instant SEO
The faster the site, the higher it ranks. Shoe Carnival is a great example for that, as it outranks the largest names out there, including Amazon, with its sub-second website.
On Layer0, ShoeCarnival.com’s mobile Lighthouse score skyrocketed. Based on our analysis of the performance scores of the leading 500 US internet retailers, ShoeCarnival.com outperforms 98% of the leading eCommerce websites.
A website’s Lighthouse score essentially shows you how Google perceives that site in terms of speed. In turn, speed impacts the site’s organic ranking. Search engines are favoring faster websites in the ranks, and ShoeCarnival.com is now outperforming and outranking the biggest names out there, including Amazon, Zappos, Nordstrom, along with other multi-billion dollar competitors for key phrases.
Layer0 doesn’t only enable speedy websites, it also simplifies and accelerates the developmental process.
Instant made simple
From a technical perspective, Layer0 simplifies the process of building, testing, optimizing and running large eCommerce websites. Shoe Carnival can now add and amend functionality and endpoints, in a fraction of the time it used to take them.
“From a general ability to add or implement new functionality, hands down Layer0 is much easier to work in.” – Drone
Layer0 puts the code in the center of your workflow. It simplifies the developmental process and accelerates testing and feedback cycles with automated tests and staging URLs for every branch created. Once live, Layer0 lets you easily monitor your site’s performance and caching in various levels of granularity, so that every optimization effort is maximized.
Drone and team are able to squeeze every millisecond out of every speed optimization effort through the use of a combination of advanced technology, built-into Layer0. These include built-in auto-AMP and Server-Side Rendering support for portable frontends, predictive prefetching and CDN-as-JavaScript to deliver a 95%+ cache hit ratio for dynamic content at the edge.
Layer0 Benefits
320ms
median page loads (LCP)
32%+
average organic traffic growth
Auto AMP
the world’s only auto AMP conversion solution
95%+
cache hit rate for dynamic content at the edge
10B+
in revenue flows through Layer0 a year
1/3rd of US shoppers
visit a Layer0-powered website every month
An instant eCommerce website can have a massive impact on your bottom-line. We’ve seen this time and time again. Join industry leaders, the likes of Sharper Image, Kate Spade, and REVOLVE that are feeling the benefits that come from a sub-second eCommerce website.