Founded by military wives Lisa Bradley and Cameron Cruse, R.Riveter was established with a mission to provide military spouses with employment, flexible income, and stability.
Unable to find meaningful employment due to their always moving, the founders invested and began their own sewing company. As the company grew, they began to expand their team, hiring more military spouses to make more handbags, providing them with a stable source of income.
Growing from a small-scale business in an attic, Rriverter has grown to become a large business hiring hundreds of military spouses. "R.Riveter doesn't hire military spouses to make handbags. We make handbags to hire military spouses and create a greater sense of mission."
Rriverter is widely known for its quality handbags, handmade by military spouses worldwide and assembled in North Carolina. As a great brand with a unique mission and quality products, it was imperative that R.Riverter take its business online.
We were starting to see that if we wanted a career in this transient military life, we'd have to create it for ourselves. Not only did we need flexible income, but we needed mobile income to travel along with us as we relocate with our military members. And that's when R.Riveter was born. 
The Challenge
Bringing their physical business online was a better way for R.Rriveter to meet more customers, particularly those outside the US. Using their site, they could now reach a wider customer base, making sure the Riveter impact is felt across the globe.
Just as they tried to improve their physical store, the team also put more effort into regularly improving their Shopify store. To do this, they found new ways to upgrade their store, adding more themes, apps, product images, and lines of code targeted at ensuring that anyone on the site enjoyed an excellent user experience.
However, as time went on, they began to notice a couple of problems with the store. One of such was that their store pages were taking even longer to load; they started to notice this when there was a huge drop in their sales. Looking to identify what was responsible for this, they noticed that their bounce rates had drastically improved as their page loading time went up.
Another noticeable problem was that their organic search traffic dropped drastically, which was also linked to their very slow store. Google loves a fast website, and as the R.Riveter store site speed began to drop, their search rankings dropped.
As such, it became imperative that R.Riveter optimize their store speed immediately to improve their page load time, speed score, and search rankings.
How R.Riveter Found EcomExperts
As a leading Shopify speed optimization agency, EcomExperts has a bulk of information and resources guaranteed to help Shopify merchants improve their store speed. In their search for help with their store speed, R.Riveter came across EcomExperts and, after browning through our wealth of information, soon realized that we were the site maintenance agency they needed.
Going on our website, they quickly booked a free consultation with our sales rep Angie. Angie talked them through the possible problems they might be facing with their store speed and how we could help them. Once the call was done, Angie sent over a contract with the terms and conditions for our optimization services.
I had a great time meeting with the R.Riveter team. They were very clear on their goals and expectations which made it a lot easier for us to carry out our tasks.
Immediately the R.Riverter team agreed to our conditions; we could move on with the process of making their store lightning fast.
How We Sped Up The R.Riverter Shopify Store
EcomExperts Senior Dev Farukh was given the job of speeding up the R.Riverter Shopify store. The team found that the loading scripts utilized in the store were responsible for a big percentage of the store's speed performance difficulties after looking at the waterfall findings. EcomExperts team began with boosting the store's speed score by introducing lazy-loading scripts for applications, content for headers, and other non-critical scripts.
Moving on, Farruk discovered duplicate applications as well as programs that were no longer in use on the Shopify store. Over 15 of the 30 apps in the store were not in use, and another 5 were duplicates. These apps have jammed the store's performance, leading it to suffer a significant slowdown. Team began by identifying the unneeded and duplicate applications; after he had a list of them, he began uninstalling them one by one, being sure to clear up any codes left behind.
The speed optimization techniques used in cleaning the R.Riverter store include:
- inlining critical CSS,
- preloading CSS
- deferring off-screen images
-managing APPS priority and applying lazy loading on other apps.
EcomExperts developers optimized both important and non-essential scripts on the store in general, ensuring that critical contents load first, regardless of how excellent or terrible the network is.
Team also included an intentional delay on non-critical scripts, pictures, and videos, which is worth noting. This was done to guarantee that the store's essential assets loaded quickly, improving the user experience.
Results
For EcomExperts, speeding up the R.Rriveter Shopify business was all in a day's work. Our crew was able to improve the store's speed score above 90 in just one day.
The team got the R.Riverter mobile score from 20 to 92.
And the desktop score from 15 to 100.
We also made certain that we employed internationally verified and accepted optimization techniques and scripts that complied with Google's standards.
R.Riveter is just one of the many Shopify stores that have had their speed optimized by EcomExperts. Being the most specialized Shopify speed optimization agency in the industry, EcomExperts is highly trained in speed maintenance, getting speed scores above 80 in no time.
Having any trouble with your site speed? Send us a message today for a free consultation on how we can get your speed score up in no time!