How Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse got a new showcase with PrestaShop Pro Services

To improve the user experience and the referencing of its online store, which today represents 35 to 40% of the turnover during the peak period, i.e. Christmas and Easter, Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse called upon PrestaShop Pro Services. A pre and post release intervention to optimize the performance of the merchant site, especially in terms of page loading time.

In the space of a few months, the number of pages viewed per session has almost doubled (+81%), while the bounce rate has halved (-57%). These strong figures can be explained by an average session time that has increased by 20%, and by an average page loading time that has dropped by 40 to 86% depending on the page. 

How did this e-shop founded in 2013 manage to achieve such results in such a short time? What were the actions implemented by PrestaShop Professional Services that led to this new success for the French online chocolate leader?

A strategic site for a brand with great potential

In 2013, Alain Ducasse created his own factory: Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse. It is then one of the rare Parisian workshops, to make chocolate by hand, from the roasting of the cocoa bean to the candy. Understanding the stakes of ecommerce, a PrestaShop store was launched in 2013.

Faced with the increase in sales traffic in 2020, partly related to containment, and the development of click & collect, the brand decided to upgrade to PrestaShop 1.7. The objective is to revisit the purchase tunnel, to optimize the display time in the front and back office and to improve the readability of the site on mobile.

We took advantage of this update of the base to redesign the purchase tunnel, to optimize the mobile version, the landing pages and the readability of the reassurance messages, and to improve our SEO from both a content and technical point of view.
Diane Le Pennec, Marketing & Digital Manager

To accompany this migration, Diane Le Pennec, marketing & digital manager, decided to call on PrestaShop Pro Services teams to perform a site performance audit, as well as server load tests. 

Photo credit: Pierre Monetta

The first phase will start in June 2020 to diagnose the various points of restraint, particularly in the back office. A second post-migration intervention, in September-October, confirmed the first analysis. The last patches necessary for an optimal functioning of the site in 1.7 are made in January 2021. A successful mission that has resulted in a significant evolution of the KPIs, and this, from the first two months with, among other things, a strong decrease in loading time:

• 40% on category pages
• 86% on back-office pages

PrestaShop Pro Services has successfully helped us to identify the causes of the slowdown of the site, particularly related to a recently installed module.
Diane Le Pennec, Marketing & Digital Manager

The key to engaging visitors and turning them into customers

The page loading time is strategic for both Internet users and mobile users, but also for natural referencing since it directly impacts the number of pages crawled by Google. Thus, SEO and user experience are at the heart of the PrestaShop Pro Services teams' know-how.

We wanted to validate the sizing of the server to ensure that it would withstand heavy loads like those we encountered during the first containment in 2020 and to support our communication campaigns.
Diane Le Pennec, Marketing & Digital Manager

Photo credit: Pierre Monetta

A collaboration between the merchant and the technical department for an optimal ecommerce result​​​​​​​

A merchant who notices a bad TTFB metric (time to first byte) should contact PrestaShop Pro Services. We are experts in the code, both core and modules, but also the operating system.
Jocelyn Fournier - PrestaShop Pro Services

The goal of PrestaShop Pro Services is to offer merchants a customized solution. With a perfect mastery of the entire system, the team focuses as much on server optimization as on PHP and MySQL optimization in order to remove all potential contention points. This same control also allows a strong reactivity in order not to penalize the activity of the site.

For Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse it was important to be very careful that the online store was ready before the end of the year celebrations, as early as October for the advent calendar.

A lasting collaboration at the heart of the PrestaShop Community​​​​​​​

All interventions performed by PrestaShop Pro Services are passed on to the Community to serve all merchants.

Changes made to modules are documented so that developers can take them into account in their updates. PrestaShop Pro Services teams work identically for the PrestaShop core releases that are included in the version upgrades so that the patches remain.

We plan to use PrestaShop Pro Services every time we migrate or make major changes to our site
Diane Le Pennec, Marketing & Digital Manager

Photo credit: Atelier Mai 98

Know how to anticipate the server's load increase

To support communication campaigns on social networks or media, PrestaShop Pro Services offers to implement Varnish, accompanied by a module developed in-house, to cope with vertical traffic peaks and ensure the performance of stores. A complementary service to the work of reducing page loading time and fine management of the MySQL cache, reserved for PrestaShop Pro Services customers.

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Crédit photo de couverture : Pierre Monetta