How Build-A-Bear succeeds with a feature-rich and fast mobile site
While the fastest mobile sites have typically been stripped of many features found on a desktop site, Build-A-Bear has cracked the formula for a feature-rich mobile site that also provides exceptional speed, according to new research from Catchpoint Systems.
The Web performance-monitoring company measured the speed and availability of leading mobile sites in dating, candy, gift and flower delivery in the days leading up to Valentine?s Day. For the most part, the slowest sites were those with the heaviest pages, except for Build-A-Bear, which took several steps that enabled it to improve performance without having to pare down the user experience.
?Build-A-Bear has redefined our mobile strategy to help us build heart for the brand through a renewed engagement strategy,? said Brian Sawyer, senior managing director of digital at Build-A-Bear Workshop, St. Louis.
"Our new Web site was developed to deliver a rich brand building experience with a focus on end user performance for the mobile devices,? he said.
?Build-A-Bear has experienced double digit increases in sales through mobile devices.?
Shortening load times
Catchpoint?s review of mobile sites found that Build-A-Bear did a couple of things that helped its site load faster.
One of steps Build-A-Bear took was to use a Web acceleration service from a major content distribution network. This helped by shortening the latency in getting the HTML from the server and in loading the rest of images and content on the page.
?They obviously did select a very pricey solution with the Web acceleration vendor,? said Dritan Suljoti, chief product officer at Catchpoint Systems Inc., New York. ?So the fact that they did make that kind of investment shows that they do care about speed.
?The design part means that their designers and their front-end developers paid attention to it,? he said.
?The fact that they had done a responsive Web page and they managed to work around the troubles to make a responsive Web page that loads specific images to different view ports ? that is quite an investment.?
With CDN vendors, end servers serve static content closer to the user. The traditional CDN service hosts images and element that do not change that often, but not home pages or search pages.
The acceleration companies accelerate even the non-static content, meaning dynamic content such as the home page.
?With the acceleration service that Build-A-Bear invested in, when consumers type in www.buildabear.com, they do not go to the company?s data center but to the CDN vendor and this vendor shortens the latency between the consumer and the data,? Mr. Suljoti said. ?They also do other optimization on top of it on getting the data from Build-A-Bear and sending it to the end user, such as minimizing text files.
Parallel loading
The second step that Build-A-Bear took was to build a Web site that is responsive so there are not any redirects.
When users go to www.buildabear.com, they get the content meant for mobile if they are on a mobile device.
Catchpoint compared the brand?s desktop site to the mobile site and found that Build-A-Bear shaved off about 300kb of data by scaling down images and tailoring content to the device.
?The site did load a lot of bytes, but a lot of the bytes were images,? Mr. Suljoti said. ?The images were not blocking the content but loaded in parallel to the content. So the browser can render them much quicker.?
Build-A-Bear could have made its mobile site even quicker by taking some additional steps, per Mr. Suljoti.
For example, one image on the site was very hefty and was not responsive to the device.
?Luckily, it was not the primary image but a secondary image that popped up later, but it was one of the things that slowed them down the most,? Mr. Suljoti said.
The findings suggest that other marketers could achieve similar results by turning their focus to mobile site performance.
?What happens with a lot of better-performing sites, is that there is someone within the company that wants to make things faster,? Mr. Suljoti said.
?It clearly showed that if you invest money, you can get things faster,? he said. ?It is just figuring out the ROI and getting it ready, that?s the key.?
Final Take
Chantal Tode is senior editor on Mobile Marketer, New York