About SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media marketing, publishing and analytics product used by agencies and marketing teams across the world. Their clientele includes Amazon, Vodafone and Mindshare.

SocialPilot offers freemium membership with plans starting from $100. Typically, prospects register for a free trial before deciding to upgrade. Hence, trial registration is an important part of their funnel to revenue and is actively tracked by their marketing and customer success teams.

Challenge

SocialPilot was looking for ways to up their rate of new user registration. They wanted to make sure that the loading speed of their marketing website was not causing loss of new account registrations. And, in case if that was happening, they wanted to plug the leakage. They also wanted to ensure an optimal speed experience for their web app's paid users.

Insights from Tezify Tracking:

Tezify tracking was enabled to measure the speed experience of new visitors to the marketing website and it's effect on registrations. A secondary goal was to track the speed experience of paid users when using the web app. Some of the findings from tracking were:

• Registration rate fell by 38% when new visitors experienced website speed of more than 3 seconds.
• 18% registrations were lost due to slowness during the tracking duration.
• More than half of the visitors coming from mobile networks experienced the website in >3 seconds.
• Specific pages in the path to registration were slower than the rest.
• A browser compatibility issue caused users using UCWeb Browser experience the entire website slower than the rest.
• More than 50% of the regular (returning) users of their web app did not benefit from cached files. This resulted in slower first page load.

Solution:

Once the impact and causes of website slowness were known, SocialPilot consulted Tezify team for speed optimization services. Here's a summary of the solutions used to address the identified issues:

• The pages that were part of the funnel to user registration were speed optimized to minimize friction. For example, the registration page was optimized to load registration fields before rest of the content like helper images, sharing widgets, etc was loaded.
• Caching strategy was optimized (hash based file names for JavaScript and style sheet files, ETags) to maximize the probability of cache-hit for returning visitors.
• Browser compatibility issue (lack of http2 support for UCWeb Browser) was resolved by optimizing website for http 1.1 fallback protocol.
• The font loading strategy for the wordpress blog was optimized to show the blog post text as early as possible. This engaged the user with blog content while images and widgets lazy loaded.
• An API driven weekly speed check via WebPageTest was setup to ensure the achieved speed gains were not lost in the future. This check tracked page speed and sizes for the key web pages.