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New Relic > Case Studies > FARFETCH Enhances Core Web Vitals by 40% through New Relic
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FARFETCH Enhances Core Web Vitals by 40% through New Relic

Technology Category
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • E-Commerce
  • Retail
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
  • Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
  • Supply Chain Visibility
  • Time Sensitive Networking
Services
  • System Integration
The Challenge
FARFETCH, a global platform for luxury fashion, faced a significant challenge when Google introduced Core Web Vitals (CWV) in 2020. These user experience metrics became a guiding light for the FARFETCH engineering team, as improving CWV meant that a site would load faster and be easier to interact with. Two of the most important CWVs for FARFETCH were Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the time it takes to display the largest content on the site, and Time to Interactive (TTI), which measures the time it takes for a site to become fully interactive for the user. The complex architecture of third-party services made it difficult for FARFETCH to identify opportunities for performance improvement.
About The Customer
Founded in 2007 by José Neves, FARFETCH began as an e-commerce marketplace for luxury boutiques around the world. Today, it operates as a platform with three business units: marketplaces, which connect customers in over 190 countries to 1,400 of the world’s best brands, boutiques, and department stores; the platform solutions business unit, which offers end-to-end commerce solutions to accelerate growth and innovation for luxury brands and retailers; and the NGG brand platform layer, which includes brand design, production, and development.
The Solution
To address this challenge, FARFETCH utilized New Relic's application performance monitoring (APM) to define the most important metrics and conduct A/B tests. This proactive approach allowed the engineering teams to gain visibility into all parts of the system, including third-party services. Deployment markers and change tracking immediately revealed the cause of an issue and allowed FARFETCH to see the result of a specific deployment. Engineering teams could then run A/B tests and gain immediate feedback on how these tests impacted user experience. This also enabled FARFETCH to prioritize opportunities in terms of ease of deployment and potential outcomes. New Relic dashboards provided instant visibility into the impact of a certain change action, making it easier for the engineering team to communicate with other areas of the business, like sales and marketing.
Operational Impact
  • The use of New Relic's application performance monitoring (APM) led to a significant cultural shift within FARFETCH. The entire organization recognized the value of technical performance in its marketplace. Emerging from the Core Web Vitals crisis, the engineering team can now effectively showcase the significance of improvements with data. FARFETCH achieved remarkable improvements in technical performance, with an almost 10% enhancement in TTI, a 40% improvement in LCP, and a substantial reduction in response times on the API ranking service, from nine seconds to one. The influence of various third-party services on performance was acknowledged, and benchmarks were utilized to assess the impact of adding or removing specific microservices. These metrics also enabled FARFETCH to place performance within a broader industry context.
Quantitative Benefit
  • 40% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint
  • 10% reduction in Time to Interactive
  • 1 second reduction in rank API response time, from 9 seconds

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