Making Escentual faster and smoother for customers

Escentual is the UK’s premier destination for beauty — fragrance, skincare, makeup, and pharmacy brands people already trust. The catalogue was strong. Traffic was strong. PDPs were where intent turned into a bag.

But the product page lagged when shoppers tried to use it. Filters, variants, add-to-bag — every tap waited. On mobile, that wait is the purchase.

The problem

INP measures how long the page takes to respond after someone clicks. On a PDP, that’s the moment they pick a shade, a size, or hit add to bag.

Escentual’s product pages were taking too long to react. Shoppers who were ready to buy felt the stall. Sitewide, the same interaction lag showed up wherever the UI had to work.

That’s not a visual problem. It’s a speed-to-response problem — and it sits on conversion.

What we changed

We didn’t redesign the store. We didn’t strip the brand catalogue or rebuild the theme from scratch.

We made the PDP respond:

• Cut the work that blocked the next paint after a click
• Prioritised the scripts that actually serve the buy action
• Brought the same interaction work down across the rest of the site

Same products. Same layout. The page just started answering when people tapped.

The result

PDP INP came down 33%. Sitewide INP came down 19%.

Conversion rate lifted 6%. That’s roughly an extra $1.8M per year.

Zero new ad spend. Nothing else changed.

Identical site. Just much faster at the moment they decided to buy.

This is the pattern we see over and over: the revenue is already on the site. Speed is what stops it leaking at the weakest link.