Tokopedia Aatif Bandey Jul 13, 2021

A Tokopedia Mobile Web Performance Case Study | by Aatif Bandey | Tokopedia Engineering | Medium

Article Summary

Tokopedia's mobile web was scoring 67-71 on PageSpeed during their biggest sale event. With most traffic on 3G, that meant 5-6 second load times when milliseconds matter most.

Tokopedia, one of Indonesia's largest e-commerce platforms, needed to optimize their Discovery pages (think Black Friday landing pages) for their annual Ramadan sale event. Their engineering team set an ambitious target: boost performance scores from the high 60s to 80+.

Key Takeaways

Critical Insight

The team tackled legacy code and performance bottlenecks to dramatically improve load times for millions of users on constrained devices and networks.

The article reveals specific optimization techniques they used to handle massive sale traffic on a dynamic, React-based platform.

About This Article

Problem

Tokopedia's Discovery pages for their Apollo Ramadan sale event had legacy code and performance issues that made pages take 5-6 seconds to load on 3G networks. During peak traffic, that kind of slowness costs conversions.

Solution

Aatif Bandey's team optimized the React and Apollo Client stack by cleaning up legacy code and refactoring their Emotion CSS-in-JS setup for better performance.

Impact

The team hit their target of 80+ PageSpeed scores, which cut load times significantly and improved the experience for millions of users on low-end devices during the sale event.