Specsavers improves customer experience and delivers measurable growth with Contentsquare

The company

Specsavers is an international optical and audiology retailer with 2,600 stores worldwide, employing over 41,500 people. It has 10 websites globally, run by regional marketing teams supported by a central team led by James Saukinsey, Head of Digital & Ecommerce. 

James’ team, which includes specialists Jacob Christiansen (Digital Insights Lead) and Thomas Quartey (Global Technical SEO Lead), is responsible for monitoring and analyzing digital journeys, user behavior, and website performance.

They ensure Specsavers’ global websites are optimized, accessible, and readily crawlable by Google—while also funneling more customers from online journeys into in-store appointments.

The Specsavers website

The challenge

Despite having a reliable analytics tech stack—Google Analytics, Search Console, BigQuery, and Databricks—the Specsavers team still lacked visibility into the why behind customer behavior.

They could see when and where users were bouncing or dropping off, but not what was driving those actions. This gap made it difficult to connect website performance issues with actual customer experience and business outcomes.

Before Contentsquare, we had no way of tying together website performance metrics like Core Web Vitals and conversion. With Contentsquare, we’re now able to make decisions based on data, and see the direct, quantifiable impact of changes on our customer behavior.

James Saukinsey

Head of Digital & Ecommerce

The solution

Specsavers started small—implementing Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics platform on 3 websites—but quickly saw the value and expanded it globally across all sites.

“We didn’t want to be in a position where we only measured site speed in 3 markets, so we introduced Contentsquare globally,” says James. “And although rolling out a new platform across multiple markets was always going to be a challenge, the support we’ve received from Contentsquare has, as always, been fantastic.”

With the global rollout in place, Specsavers then added the Speed Analysis capability, which combines real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring to provide in-depth web performance insights.

Specsavers can check vital website metrics (like page loading times) to see poorly performing pages with Contentsquare's Speed Analysis

Having successfully implemented Contentsquare, Specsavers can now combine customer behavior data with website performance metrics to easily quantify the impact of website performance on key metrics like conversion and bounce rate.

Plus, having one seamless platform to work with has enabled James’ team to work more efficiently.

“Rather than having to use 2 separate tools with separate logins to analyze behavior and performance data, we’re now able to use one tool for everything,” says James. “As you can imagine, this has sped up our work significantly.”

Here are 2 ways Specsavers used Contentsquare to connect performance and customer behavior.

1. Measuring the impact of site speed on conversion during replatforming

Before the go-live date of a back-end PHP replatforming project, James’ team used Contentsquare to set up synthetic Core Web Vitals checks across the site, helping establish a baseline of performance figures for comparison. They also set up real user monitoring to segment users with good and bad Core Web Vitals scores.

After the update went live, Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis capability allowed the team to quantify the impact of slow site speed on conversion—something James says “wouldn’t be possible without Contentsquare.”

James and his team could see that customers with the slowest Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores were more likely to leave the site straight away and less likely to convert. But on top of that, James says “Contentsquare showed us that users who experience faster site speed are more likely to click on CTAs, convert better, and follow a more linear journey."

2. Optimizing the performance of the Store Locator page

Building on this success, the Specsavers SEO team turned their attention to one of their most critical user journeys: the Store Locator pages. 

These pages are often a customer’s first touchpoint with the brand and play a crucial role in booking in-store appointments. But they were slowed down by heavy, map-based page elements—creating a poor LCP score that impacted conversions across 1,000+ stores.

As Thomas explained:

It’s been widely touted in SEO and conversion optimization that the faster the website—the more responsive it is—the better your conversion numbers will be as a result. And for us, improving LCP on the store locator meant improving both user experience and business performance.

Thomas identified the interactive map element as the largest factor affecting LCP. With insights from Contentsquare, the team made targeted optimizations:

• Applied static map optimization to the Google Maps API

• Used preload to prioritize maps on load

Synthetic checks revealed a -68% reduction in LCP, and Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification showed how those changes translated into more bookings, more revenue, and a better customer experience.

“We made the big thing less big, and things were faster as a result,” says Thomas. 

Contentsquare helped Thomas’ team show not just the performance uplift, but the real-world impact on conversions and customer behavior, allowing the team to build stakeholder confidence and developer buy-in by clearly illustrating the business value of performance improvements.

“Contentsquare can explain why things are happening and supports us in getting stakeholder buy-in,” says Jacob. “It gives us a more holistic view of performance that we just couldn’t get from other tools.”

You’ve only got one chance to make a first impression, and for many customers, that’s on the website before they even step into a store. If their online experience is slow or frustrating, they’ll remember that—just as they would remember bad service in-store.

Thomas Quartey

Global Technical SEO Lead

The results

Following their PHP replatforming project, Specsavers used Contentsquare to measure and prove the business impact of performance updates across their websites:

• +33% conversion rate of optics booking

• +24% ecommerce purchase rate

• -25% reduction in bounce rate

On the Store Locator project, the team achieved even more targeted improvements:

• -68% reduction in LCP (synthetic checks)

• +17% improvement in bounce rate

• +1m34 increase in average session duration

• A minimum increase of 15K additional bookings per year

• +6.5% increase in booking conversion rates

Specsavers is a mission-led business focused on helping people's sight and hearing, so having a tool like Contentsquare to understand customer behavior and journeys and make them better is really important. And it's only going to become more important as our ecommerce channel grows and we start providing more of our services online.

James Saukinsey

Head of Digital & Ecommerce

What’s next?

This has been a really great learning experience for us… [Contentsquare] has helped us tell some interesting stories, showing the value of what the team is doing with SEO… and helping get more buy-in from stakeholders and developers.

Jacob Christiansen,

Digital Insights Lead

Specsavers continues to replatform and upgrade core systems, from its content management system (CMS) to ecommerce. Contentsquare will remain central in:

• Measuring the impact of future migrations on performance and customer experience

• Ensuring new launches meet or exceed current performance baselines

• Unifying the offline and online journey, aligning in-store data with digital behavior

Creating a unified customer journey requires a lot of trackable data and insights alignment. Contentsquare plays an important part in documenting customer journeys and understanding the why behind them. That’s only going to get more important for us.

Jacob Christiansen,

Digital Insights Lead