With more than half their website visitors browsing on mobile devices, Zitmaxx Wonen boost conversions and store visits by focusing on speed and user experience.
As a business with a strong online and offline presence, furniture retailer Zitmaxx Wonen have long understood the importance of providing a great customer experience across multiple channels. With 51% of visitors to their website now coming from smartphones (1), the brand have seen first-hand how mobile has changed consumer behaviour, and are adapting to this challenge. “It’s important to realize the value of store visits,” explains Erik Lagas, SEA Specialist, at Zitmaxx Wonen. “Mobile is the first step in the process, and needs to provide inspiration - not just to buy online but also to drive people to the store.”
“Mobile is the first step in the process, and needs to provide inspiration - not just to buy online but also to drive people to the store.”
- Erik Lagas, SEA Specalist, Zitmaxx Wonen
Mobile First = Mobile Fast
Recognising the role of mobile as a bridge between the online and offline worlds prompted Zitmaxx Wonen to undertake a project to improve the speed and usability of their mobile site. In the past, the brand’s mobile site design and user experience weren’t extensively tested for speed and conversion performance. But with data from Google Analytics and Google Ads Store Visits2 reports, Zitmaxx Wonen began to understand the exact impact that mobile speed was having on key business metrics.
The next step was to use Google’s Pagespeed Insights and Test My Site tools to audit the site’s performance and to identify areas for technical improvement, such as image size and asynchronous script loading. The scores from these tools represent real-world site speed on mobile devices, and since slower sites often provide inferior usability, the results correlate to the quality of user experience. With the results in hand, Zitmaxx Wonen then worked with their hosting provider, Hipex, to redesign their mobile site around the recommendations. “A lot of the time, businesses are scared off by the development resources required to make these improvements,” says Johan van de Pol, System Engineer at Hipex. “But speed is so important to the overall quality of ecommerce experiences, so we wanted to make these changes as scalable as possible so they can continue to be used in the future.”
Inspirational & Fast
Because of its dual role as a starting point for both online purchases and physical store visits, Zitmaxx Wonen and Hipex decided to focus first on the site’s homepage. With these improvements in place, Zitmaxx Wonen achieved a maximum score of 100 on PageSpeed Insights, and a load time of 3 seconds on Test My Site - significantly outperforming their category average of 4 seconds (3). In addition to improving speed and accessibility, key business metrics have also improved since the launch of the updated mobile site: mobile conversion rates are up by 50.2%, while mobile revenue has increased by 98.7% (4).
With such strong evidence of the impact improvements in speed and usability can have on customer outcomes, Zitmaxx Wonen now have a clearer vision of how to succeed in a mobile-first world. “Our website needs to be inspirational, so it needs to be fast,” says Erik Lagas, looking towards the next phase of development. “Now the homepage and other parts of the website are much faster on a mobile device, we’re going to increase our focus on mobile user experience, not only in speed but also in design.”
