Optimising Performance
for Top Lifestyle Magazine
London based SheerLuxe have built a huge audience with a rapacious appetite for the latest fashion and lifestyle content. The business model is centred on attracting and maintaining visitors to the site and presenting rich editorial content on page and in video. At peak times they can expect over 50,000 users at once. Ensuring excellent site speed and suggesting appropriate follow-on content keeps visitors on site.
SheerLuxe and Orphans.
On Trend.
SheerLuxe had become very popular, very quickly. Visitor numbers were growing rapidly and their website was feeling the strain. Orphans took on the existing Drupal site to stabilise and improve site performance. This phase helped demonstrate our technical credentials and paved the way for a complete front-end redesign, further enhancing technical delivery and providing the SheerLuxe team with page building tools to make great looking content that’s presented consistently and on-brand across a large editorial team.
Our developers may be unlikely to feature on the fashion pages but they are ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing highly technical performance optimisations. Years into our relationship we continue to work very closely with the SheerLuxe team on a weekly basis, discussing and implementing new ideas and small optimisations as they arise.
Key Stats
The All Important KPI's
4 Million
Monthly Page Views
61%
Growth In Visitors
20x
Faster Page Load Time
What’s Clever
Selectively rewriting and improving what previous developers implemented, we have made great improvements to load times and allowed the server to handle far more traffic without the expense or investment of a complete new build. A lot of gains have come from moving to a cloud infrastructure backed by our work on website caching and database performance. Knowing their peak traffic loads we have verified (through real load testing) that the website will hold up to sustained traffic many times higher than they experience at the moment.
Website and Server Side Optimisation
We manage SheerLuxe hosting on their own cloud server allowing a 360 degree perspective on detailed site speed and user interactions. This has helped us make a series of iterations, some small others more substantial, which combine to create a site packed with content but an effortless browsing experience.