Optimize for speed with Performance Edge

Run more A/B tests across your website without worrying about impacting site speed. By moving experiment processing from the browser to the edge, we’ve seen a median load time of 50 milliseconds. That’s faster than the blink of an eye.

Speed and experimentation are critical to the user experience

In today’s highly competitive digital landscape, experience optimization is crucial to your company’s success. Performance is no exception. Milliseconds directly impact revenue when it comes to page load time. In Why Performance Matters, Google cites an example where cutting page load time in half resulted in a 12-13% boost in sales.

For many teams, a desire to scale client-side experimentation leads to tough calls between test velocity and web page speed. On the one hand, when you run more experiments, you see a much greater impact on business metrics.

This growth opportunity leads teams to run many experiments at once with easy-to-use, client-side testing solutions. On the other hand, as the number of concurrent experiments increases, so too does the amount of code to be downloaded and executed, adding to page load time. While the impact on speed is often imperceptible, it is more likely to affect resource-constrained browsers. Performance is most affected in mobile browsers and other environments with lower network speed.

Addressing trade-offs between test velocity and page speed

BiggerPockets provides online education, community, tools, and resources for current and aspiring real estate investors. When they decided to invest more heavily in A/B testing, they partnered with Optimizely to improve their user acquisition growth.

With Optimizely, BiggerPockets more than doubled the number of tests run per month. According to BiggerPocket’s analysis, the cumulative effect of their wins generated a 72% sign-up rate increase in just 9 months. The business improvements coincided with a growing challenge: increased page load time. So they decided to try Performance Edge.

How Performance Edge improved speed index by 29%

With Edge, BiggerPockets drove a massive boost toward their end of year performance goal to improve site speed. According to Lighthouse, which uses simulated traffic to measure site performance, their Speed Index decreased by 1.2 seconds, a 29% improvement. 

Since adopting Performance Edge, BiggerPockets no longer has to make trade-offs between vital tests they want to run and site speed. In addition to the 29% improvement in their Speed Index score, they expect to see improvements in SEO rankings as Google includes page speed as a signal in search ranking.