Sole Mate
Services: Site UX and Page Speed & Optimisation
Website: www.sole-mate.uk
Sole Mate opened their doors on the 31st March 2023, as an independent specialist running retail store in Merthyr Tydfil, and whilst Sole Mate seems like a clever play on words, they want people to understand the meaning behind the name and the brand.
They had a few names for the shop, but they wanted to capture their mission, "to ignite the power of human belief through a happier and healthier lifestyle".
The Problem: A Slow and Sluggish Mobile Load Speed
Sole Mate approached Squashed Pixel to distinguish itself from their competitors by having a faster mobile and desktop website. They sought web performance optimisation to enhance the website's speed and user experience for Sole Mate's benefit. Sole Mate aimed to improve their page speed and optimise their user experience to boost conversion rates.
Sole Mate's website had a significant number of unoptimised and large image files which resulted in slow loading times. Additionally, the website had a high DOM size with too many HTML tags on pages and incorrect webfont loading. As a result, visitors to Sole Mate's website had to wait longer than the benchmarked performance for the main image or text block to display, which dramatically increases the risk of losing a potential customer.
The Solution: A Technical Review
To begin with, our technical team utilised GTMetrix and Google Lighthouse tool (also used by Google PageSpeed Insight), to comprehensively assess the website's overall performance and identify its shortcomings and where improvements could be made.
Before commencing our work, Squashed Pixel noted Sole Mate's PageSpeed performance for desktop devices with scores of 84 and 87, for the Homepage and Collection page, respectively as our benchmark to improve upon. To enhance these scores and bring them closer to 100, our technical team devised a list of recommendations based on both page speed and user experience perspectives.
The team then implemented the UX recommendations based on the mobile view of the site but also took into consideration the desktop view where appropriate.
The Outcome: A Faster and User Friendly Website
After the optimisation process was completed, Sole Mate witnessed a remarkable improvement in both their mobile and desktop websites. Their performance on Google PageSpeed Insights has increased across the board, with a score of 98 (desktop) and 100 (mobile).
Moreover, the website is now more user-friendly and easier to navigate, ensuring that visitors can find what they're looking for quickly, resulting in a more positive experience overall.
Industry best practise states that the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be 2.5 seconds or less to provide a good user experience. Sole Mate's desktop site now scores way above average, with only 1.1 seconds after our latest work.
Good URLs returned to 100% since the website updates and in tandem with some further SEO work and content updates saw Sole Mates’s Domain Authority rise by 5 points from 9 to 14 in a week.
Sole Mate
www.sole-mate.uk
"We found Squashed Pixel through the Shopify Experts search, when we put out a request for help. After an initial chat with Daniel and Tom, where I explained the issues I was having on the performance of the mobile website for the shop, they got it, and started to look into the why's and how we could improve it to improve our conversion rates and user experience. A week after go live and conversions are already up on the previous month. Thank guys, recommended for any business looking to improve their users web journey and experience."
The Sole Mate team