HELM Boots
Posted by Cameron Shaw on
We're psyched to launch the new version of Helm Boots.
Their old site was a bit lacking on the design side, but the primary issue was speed and performance issues, as well as the inability to modify the site content (html stashed via RTE, and embedded PDF's on pages).
We rebuilt and re-designed the Helm Boots site, the first phase was deployed last week.
Performance results:
Collection page before and after (using 1.5MB connection)
Product Page before and after
Testing on an unmetered connection, the new homepage is quite fast:
As are the collection and product pages:
A few interesting things to note. Firstly, while infinite scroll is a nice feature, it can be an absolute performance nightmare if not implemented correctly (1.3k+ http requests?!).
Also, the raw performance grades given by various website speed testing tools (pagespeed insights, gtmetrix, pingdom, etc.) don't always apply well to Shopify. It's important to know what is actually affecting speed, and what can be safely disregarded. For example, shopify sites always get docked major points for having URL parameters on their resources (necessary for versioning through the CDN), and for not parallelizing downloads across multiple domains (not necessary if you have a fast and globally distributed CDN).
We're quite pleased with the new design as well. All elements were built out using Shopify sections, such that they can be easily modified through the shopify admin. For example, on the press page, each press item has a url, title, description, and image, and new press items can be added at the click of a button. When I built the page I loaded in 4 press items migrated from the old site. Just checked and there's about 20... great to see it's working well and being utilized!
The new site is up and live, you can check it out here: http://helmboots.com/