BreakerYard Performance
The challenge
Breakeryard.com has a constant flow of customers and breakers engaging in real-time sales and interactions. Delivering the right fixes, changes and improvements is vital to maintaining their customer and seller experiences - and their bottom line.
Yet, balancing priorities can be hard - even on a good day. Striking the “perfect” balance between product investment and maintaining margins is even more difficult when your product is a live website serving thousands of customers daily!
The results
Strides ahead from when they joined us, BreakerYard have built a strong brand reputation and a customer experience that continues to deliver repeat sales.
Our unwavering commitment to supporting business and customer with an excellent experience helps us deliver accurate guidance and reliable improvements.
The Google Core Web Vitals assessment has kept passing all the while adding new functionality and features to a busy website.
We've identified key interactions on the site and made them up to 10x faster!
Candid discussions
When we started working with the site, there were a plethora of performance issues, customer experience problems and unreliable features. We worked tirelessly with the BreakerYard team to review and prioritise their issues regularly, supporting and challenging decisions where necessary.
Our strong business relationship is the result of continual demonstration of experience, reliability and pragmatism, and we all benefit from the trust that has built.
Performance for SEO
Maintaining or boosting your search ranking in the face of ever-changing SEO requirements and expectations is never easy. The web is always moving forward, and its regular shifts in technologies and expectations usually bring additional load to an already busy pile of tickets!
Plus, whilst modern Drupal is built to support today’s key SEO recommendations, older sites with a lot of custom functionality can require more effort to keep up.
When priorities and available capacity aligned, we were able to assess and quickly deliver the benefits from things like lazily loading images and preloading assets.
Performance for CX
Fast page loads and quick submissions usually make for happy customers. So when site performance interferes with journeys, sales and conversions it’s important to take note and prioritise accordingly.
Furthermore, having quality, performant code is not only good for business and customer, but also the environment - reducing wasteful use of compute resource mitigates our impact on the planet. “Green” code is a win for everyone!
Our specific diagnoses and improvements during calm times, and rapid interventions where needed, have helped BreakerYard maintain their customer experience and strong brand approval [4.8 on Trustpilot, last we looked!].
Caching key data with Drupal’s API
With a wide variety of content and user actions, page caching alone would not keep BreakerYard performant.
Part of Drupal’s performance arsenal since the early days is the ability to cache regularly-used data for reuse later. Smart use of data caching has the potential to save hundreds of milliseconds from each request.
Through various targeted investigations over the years, we identified a range of data points that could be cached and reused, rather than computed (or fetched from an API) every time.
Optimised code
Anyone can use a good tool badly, and the same applies to Drupal; without the right considerations, it’s easy to write custom code that runs slowly and affects overall performance. Simply upping the hosting server package won’t be an effective use of resources.
We didn’t do the original build for this site, and can understand how time pressure can prioritise speed of delivery over quality and performance.
Through a combination of targeted measurements and very good hunches, we have slowly removed or improved a variety of inefficient code scenarios.