The Company
Interflora is the global leader in flowers, plants and gifts delivery. With a continuously developing network of over 58,000 points of sale in more than 150 countries, the company ensures its stores are all characterized by the same standards of efficiency, quality and floral culture.
The Challenge
The international online florist was facing the daily challenges of e-commerce. To cope with the many requests coming from its global customer base, a high web performance was required. Special attention was needed around Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day which represented the peak periods where the highest volume of sales was made, and therefore it was essential to deliver a superb online shopping experience during those days.
The Solution
Baqend’s Speed Kit, a plug and play approach to accelerating loading times of websites based on PWA technology and innovative caching algorithms, enabled Interflora to significantly improve the performance of its website. By implementing this solution on its channels, Interflora was able to accelerate the Time-To-First Byte metric, ensuring a faster processing of responses and a more efficient execution of all subsequent actions, such as rendering the website.
Match-Maker Ventures’ Key Role
Match-Maker Ventures was proud to enable this successful collaboration with our network of senior industry experts. Match-Maker Jean Haguet identified the opportunity for this collaboration with Interflora through a personal connection to Interflora’s CIO. In discussions with the CIO, Jean discovered that Interflora was seeking web performance improvement, and was able to connect Interflora’s objectives and requirements with Baqend’s solutions and constraints.
After the initial identification of the pain point and potential solution in MMV’s portfolio, Jean and Match-Maker Ventures headquarters supported the collaboration end-to-end, leveraging Jean’s personal connections, industry expertise, and extensive experience in business to ensure the process was smooth and well-managed. Through the expected ups and downs of any collaboration process, Jean was able to ensure that the collaboration partners Baqend and Interflora found the right way to work together and achieved joint success.
The Main Results
The implementation of Baqend’s Speed Kit enabled Interflora to improve the user experience on its website as outlined in the Google Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report below. Since the plugin’s launch in May, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric improved from 65% to 75%, a metric that has significant impact on Interflora’s search engine ranking and web traffic from organic searches. Overall, Speed Kit sped up the LCP metric by 24% and accelerated Interflora’s website by 1.7x.
“Our revenue stream is very seasonal. Performance needs to be outstanding in both lows- and highs of traffic. Speed Kit was able to improve our website performance in Italy by delivering fast loading times, even under high demand.”
Nicolas Pastorino – Group Chief Product & Technology Officer
About Baqend
Baqend is helping companies “perform better online” by accelerating the website loading time. As a university spinoff with years of research, Baqend has developed a unique algorithm enabling them to accelerate the loading time of websites by a factor of 2-3x with minimal effort. They are currently live on 7,000 websites and serve over 100 million unique users monthly.