PSD (psd.com) is the maker of stylish and comfortable underwear aimed at athletes, trendsetters, and artists. Emerging as a response to evolving youth-driven streetwear culture, PSD now boasts collaborations with popular franchises like Marvel and Playboy and a roster of high-profile ambassadors, including NBA stars Ja Morant and Bronny James. Their online store has been foundational to feature and sell their premium apparel.

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The Challenge

As a brand grows, so too does the complexity of its digital presence. PSD has a heavily customized apparel website employing lots of high quality imagery and utilizing much third party code. The weight of these factors were affecting site speed and their Core Web Vitals (performance metrics that affect search rankings). On mobile devices, load times were reaching an intolerable 6 seconds and longer across the site. Several attempts were made to improve site performance, including advanced caching services, but none seemed to help enough. And as PSD headed into Q3, they were up against the clock to get their site optimized before holiday sales started a few months later.

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The Solution

Render Better is no stranger to quickly turning around sweeping improvements to site performance. Within the first week of working together, a staging website was set up with optimizations tuned to PSD’s heavily customized website where both teams could test performance and ensure the optimizations worked flawlessly. Once Render Better’s optimizations were live, Render Better worked closely with PSD’s digital agency, SeedCMS (seedcms.com), to apply further optimization refinements. Leveraging the advanced performance real user monitoring (RUM) analytics within Render Better’s platform, both Render Better and SeedCMS were easily able to spot where performance issues remained from third party code and swiftly made changes to correct problems, right on time before holiday sales.

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The Results

After installing and implementing Render Better’s optimizations, PSD saw a whopping 54% improvement to site speed. Below is Shopify’s own performance dashboard that illustrates the impact of these optimizations.

Once optimizations were launched, Render Better ran a month-long A/B test to evaluate the impact optimizations were making for PSD’s business and found optimizations increased conversion rate by 2.7% and revenue per session by 4.4%.

The below chart from real PSD visitors illustrates this impact plainly: sessions having faster loading times with Render Better (blue curve) have higher conversion rates (green line), compared to unoptimized sessions (red curve).

Thanks to Render Better’s optimization platform and quick setup, site speed was a problem of the past for PSD, giving them a significant leg up for Q4 holiday sales.