Boosting Web Performance for a Global Fashion Retailer

A major North American fashion retailer operating several lifestyle brands sought to improve online performance amid global expansion. With both retail stores and a fast-growing digital presence, the company faced website speed issues affecting user experience, SEO, and revenue.

Over 30 days, its e-commerce site served 25 million page views and generated nearly $6 million. Partnering with Harper, the retailer modernized its edge architecture and optimized caching, achieving faster load times, stronger Core Web Vitals, and higher conversion rates within weeks.

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The Performance Problem

Before working with Harper to improve performance, the retailer’s website struggled with long initial load times and poor Core Web Vitals performance, particularly on product detail pages—the heart of the conversion funnel.

Time to First Byte (TTFB) often exceeded three to four seconds, while Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) delays were dragging down organic search performance and customer engagement. The underlying issue stemmed from inefficient caching: pages were cached for only five minutes and lacked global replication. This meant that nearly every user request hit the origin, generating unnecessary latency and higher infrastructure costs.

This inefficiency caused substantial origin load and latency across both Harper’s and Akamai’s caching layers. In short, the company needed a faster, more efficient way to deliver content globally without sacrificing freshness or flexibility for its marketing and merchandising teams.

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The Harper Solution

Platform Migration & Framework Hosting
Harper provided a rapid transition from the retailer’s previous edge platform, standing up a fully compatible environment for its modern JavaScript framework in just a few weeks. This included support for dynamic page transformations, ensuring that personalized attributes and merchandising logic remain intact.

Global Edge Caching Strategy
Harper helped the retailer unlock significant performance gains by redesigning their caching approach. Harper’s granular controls extended the cache duration on product detail pages from 5 minutes to roughly 23 hours, while also enabling full edge replication for uniform performance across regions without increasing origin calls. All in all, this raised cache hit rates to roughly 80% and significantly reduced origin load, cutting TTFB by more than half.

Browser Optimization with Early Hints
To tackle LCP delays, Harper deployed HTTP 103 Early Hints, allowing browsers to preload critical assets while waiting for the origin response. This closed the final performance gap on key product pages, enabling up to 50% faster visual rendering.

Each step combined to collapse multiple layers of latency, simplify operations, and accelerate the entire digital experience without increasing developer or infrastructure overhead.

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Conclusion

Through its partnership with Harper, the retailer achieved a leaner, faster, and more resilient digital storefront. The improvements in caching and content delivery reduced load times by nearly 70%, improved Core Web Vitals across the board, and boosted organic and conversion performance.

The project underscores how collapsing the stack and optimizing edge delivery can transform user experience—and, by extension, business growth—for any global retailer navigating the demands of modern e-commerce.

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