The document discusses Deckers' journey to improve website performance. It started with a mandate for faster sites but lack of proper tools and goals made progress difficult. Deckers implemented new monitoring tools to establish baselines and identify bottlenecks. They created performance budgets and goals to prioritize issues. Deckers also addressed third-party pixel performance through budgets and SLAs. These efforts helped Deckers improve load times by 33% across properties.

1. With Deckers
Proactive Strategies for Finding
and Fixing Performance Issues

2. Who are we?
Billy Hoffman
Director of Product at Rigor
Ryan Vila
System Engineer at SOASTA

3. Why are we here?
• Performance is $$$
– Most businesses tackle performance when
it’s too late
• We want to teach you how to:
– Build budgets for performance
– Find & fix your biggest problems first
– Enable cross-functional buy-in for
performance
– Create processes that will prevent
performance defects from impacting your
users in the future

4. The real star of the show
Nick Smotek
Digital Technology Manager at
Deckers
Fun Facts:
• 13 years w/ Deckers
• Has served as the lead dev
• Founded the UX department
which manages performance
monitoring and optimization

5. The Deckers Performance Story
• This all started with a mandate from
Management for sites to be “Faster”
• We weren’t making much progress for a
variety of reasons…..

6. Legacy monitoring tools
• Our existing toolset was:
– Complex
– Expensive (required consultation)
– Had poor UX
– Difficult for us to gain insights

7. Lots of brands

8. With cross-functional teams

9. Also, what is “Faster”?
We didn’t know:
• How fast we were
• How fast we should be
• How to build performance goals that
were concrete and actionable

10. First things first: Find New Tools
Previously we were Synthetic-Only. We knew we wanted to
change things up. Here are some of the things we were looking
for:
A RUM solution to:
– Identify UX bottlenecks
– Prioritize performance
optimization efforts
– Understand performance
impact on business metrics
A new synthetic solution to:
– Establish a baseline
– Create benchmarks
against the competition
– Identify optimizations and
fix site problems

11. Establish Performance Baselines

12. Identify Bottlenecks

13. Then understand your
load time distribution

14. Benchmark Your Competitors

15. Find your performance sweetspot

16. Use the data to create
performance budgets and goals
● Media size budget under 700k
● Rigor Optimization Performance
Score Goal 90 or better
● TTI (Time to interactive)
○ Goal 1 second
● Limit requests to under 80
● Create goals for your synthetic
data using:
○ Synthetic Baselines
○ Competitive Benchmarks
○ RUM what-if Analysis
● Make SMART goals:
○ Specific
○ Measurable
○ Achievable/Realistic
○ Time-bound
● Tie real dollars to your goals

17. Bite off small bits at a time

18. Create Guardrails for Performance Regression

19. The 3rd Party Problem….
• We are Marketing HEAVY:
– Lots of pixels (25) that delay
page load
– Many non-technical
stakeholders

20. Identify offenders
• Use the mPulse Waterfall
chart to analyze all page
load resources
• Use custom timers and
alerting to monitor specific
third parties

21. Build internal processes to
constrain the impact of 3rd parties
What we did:
• Established 3rd party performance budgets
– Total load time for all pixels on site must not exceed 3 seconds. Unless it can be off loaded to
after DOM Complete
• Created a strict SLA policy for 3rd parties
– 99.9999% uptime
– Cannot throw any errors
– Must load under 500ms
– Limit redirect chains to less than 3 or none at all.
• We immediately remove pixels of services experiencing downtime
• We discussed with our Marketers the impact of the 3PC pixels on
our conversion rate and they were very receptive

22. Ensure effective communication
• Build reports that summarize your key KPIs
– Send out to website stakeholders at consistent
intervals
• Be very intentional about how you configure alerts:
– Alerts should be meaningful, not noise
– People quickly ignore alerts if they are constant
• Constantly share successes!

23. Make web performance fun!

24. Create time to consistently
evaluate your progress
We take time every month to
compile reports from Rigor
Monitoring, Rigor Optimization, and
SOASTA’s mPulse to make
recommendations to our different
teams about performance
prioritization.

25. What’s Next?
• Test Earlier
• Configure more advanced
alerting with our RUM data
• Deep analysis of data using
SOASTA Data Science
Workbench
• Hook performance testing into
our deployment process

26. Results
Changes in March (close to 1.9 seconds)
Changes in June (close to 1.2 seconds)
• Took control of performance goals
and budget
• Gained buy in from executive team
• Improved TTI time across all
properties by 33%
• 3rd party pixels down from 35 to 25
• Created consistent reporting across
the organization

27. Takeaways
• Performance improvement is not optional
• Justify site improvements with ROI / What-If analysis
• Take control of your performance budgets
• Performance is a process
• Set S.M.A.R.T. performance objectives
• Take control of 3rd party SLA’s
• Set alerts consciously

28. Q&A
Download the RUM+Synthetic data sheet here:
https://www.soasta.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/mP-
and-rigor-data-sheet_screen3.pdf