A specialty building materials retailer sells through a showroom and a bilingual online catalogue. The catalogue was heavy, inconsistent and slow on phones, which is where most of its visitors are. Megawebvision cut the mobile homepage from 4.1 MB to 1.5 MB, the main product archive from 5.7 MB to 2.0 MB, and published 572 product pages on one template with full English and French coverage.
- +36%more organic sessions, year on year21,734 to 29,472 organic sessions, January to August
- +31%more returning visitors5,929 to 7,744 returning users over the same months
- +26%more form submissions4,633 to 5,815 submitted forms, sample and trade enquiries included
- +40%higher customer retentionclient-reported over the engagement
- +200%more designer programme registrations and sample requestsclient-reported over the engagement
- 63%less data on the mobile homepage4,135,923 bytes to 1,533,092 bytes at 390 px
- 66%less data on the product archive5,707,660 bytes to 1,956,757 bytes
- 572product pages on one template286 English and 286 French, 286 of 286 covered in both
- 875 msmedian homepage load336 ms first contentful paint, three-run snapshot
Situation
The catalogue is the business. Designers and homeowners browse collections on their phones, then visit the showroom or apply for a trade account. The site carried full-size swatch images on archive pages, product pages that differed from collection to collection, and a mobile homepage that transferred more than four megabytes before anyone could scroll.
The symptom leadership could see was that the site felt slow and looked uneven. The constraint underneath it was the catalogue structure: every collection had been built by hand, so every fix had to be made 50 times.
The constraint
This was a conversion-stage constraint, not a demand problem. Visitors were arriving. They were waiting on swatches that weighed up to 1.09 MB each, reading product pages with different layouts in each language, and leaving before the showroom or the designer application entered the picture.
What was done
The work replaced hand-built pages with one governed template and moved the weight out of the path.
- One shared product template rolled across the catalogue: 572 published pages, 286 in English and 286 in French, with 286 of 286 products covered in both languages.
- 50 collections enriched; 49 collections and 98 English and French configurations reviewed across 196 page checks.
- Archive swatches replaced with 1 to 11 KB derivatives in place of 0.64 to 1.09 MB originals.
- Card-frame CSS reduced from 243 KB to 21 KB; Redis object caching verified active on September 11, 2026.
- Long collection and product pages made materially shorter: one collection 32 percent shorter at 390 px, one product detail page 38 percent shorter on desktop and 25 percent on phone.
- A designer application and a homeowner portal added as the conversion paths the catalogue now leads to.
Readout
The mobile homepage now transfers 1,533,092 bytes instead of 4,135,923, a 63 percent reduction. The main product archive transfers 1,956,757 bytes instead of 5,707,660, 66 percent less. On a warm cache the homepage loads in 811 ms with a 106 ms time to first byte; a three-run snapshot on September 11 measured a median load of 875 ms and first contentful paint at 336 ms.
One caveat is recorded in the delivery report and repeated here: the byte reductions are exact before-and-after measurements, but there was no clean pre-project load-time baseline, so the load figures are current state, not a percentage improvement.
The commercial read is in the analytics. Comparing January to August 2026 with the same months of 2025: organic sessions rose 36 percent, from 21,734 to 29,472; total sessions rose 34 percent; returning visitors rose 31 percent, from 5,929 to 7,744; and submitted forms, which include sample and trade enquiries, rose 26 percent, from 4,633 to 5,815.
Alongside the traffic, the client reports customer retention up 40 percent and designer programme registrations and sample requests up more than 200 percent over the engagement (client-reported).
The delivery report itself was published to the client on CHIEF on September 11, 2026, with the live readback attached.
What leadership could decide next
With one template and a fast catalogue, the next decision is demand: which collections deserve search and paid investment now that the page they land on can carry it.
What was activated
- Website performance and conversion
- Catalogue architecture and product enrichment
- Bilingual content system
- Designer application and homeowner portal
- Delivery reporting on CHIEF