Dog is Good
Web Development // Performance Optimization
“Thank you for your hard work and dedication to getting this done. This is the most professional correspondence I’ve had with any tech stuff over the life of this business.”
-Dog is Good co-founder + co-owner
Brand: Dog is Good
Business Type: Dog-inspired apparel e-com store
Agency: Client-direct
Location: Virtual
Services Provided
Problem:
Sometimes the most important part of a website is the part you can’t see.
Dog is Good is a successful national e-commerce company with a big online shop filled with lots of products. The website had become so bloated with unneeded code, third-party scripts and files that it was taking an astonishing 16-32 seconds to load. (Ideal load time for e-com is under 3 seconds.)
For an e-commerce store, every second in load time counts when it comes to sales, so this issue was disastrous for the company.
They commissioned Cowbelly to ‘fix it’.
Solution:
A mystery hunt through the server to find the source of tens of gigabytes in files, slow-loading scripts and other nefarious actors, get rid of them all and speed up the site so customers could browse and buy happily.
Despite a massive backend, we worked our magic and managed to get the site load time down to consistently under 3 seconds, found the source of the files, freed up a whopping 41GB of server space, got rid of a bunch of problematic scripts, and updated the entire site.
The resulting benefits to the company included:
- a significantly improved the customer experience
- dramatically improved the SEO (Google loathes slow-loading sites and ranks them slower than fast-loading sites)
- lowered their bounce rate and increased their time on site
- saved the company thousands of dollars annually as they were facing needing to upgrade their hosting and server prior to our work
See the Gtmetrix and Google Lighthouse reports below for the results we obtained for the company.
Biggest challenge:
Finding the source of thousands of errant files in various locations that were bloating the disc. Then finding the cause of those files and banishing it for life.
Best part of the project:
Solving the mystery during the ‘server treasure hunt’, and getting it all cleaned up. What a feeling of accomplishment!
