Emirates Airline

Background

Emirates is the Middle East’s largest airline, flying to over 150 destinations in 85 countries. The company’s mobile app and website work in concert to enable travelers to learn about airline amenities and services, book flights, and subsequently manage those bookings.

The airline’s digital assets are developed and maintained by specialist teams within Emirates, and their usage is high (15m monthly visits to the website, for example).

Yet, just a few years ago, the Emirates Airline site was taking over 15 seconds to load on an initial visit. The team responsible for the home page and the Experience page, agreed to work closely with Google to fix this issue with the hopes of improving the user experience.

Challenge

Improve the performance metrics of the Emirates Airline home page and Experience page. Target metrics: speed index, time to interactive (TTI), first contentful paint (FCP). In a nutshell, the goal was to bring Emirates in line with the fastest airline websites in the world.

Solution

A specialized Google team consisting of myself as a Better Web specialist and another engineer worked regularly with the Emirates team in a multi-year process that included implementing page loading best practices, automated performance testing, regular dashboard reports, and thorough code optimization.

Examples of the strategies recommended included partial page rehydration using Next.js, reduction of UI layout shift, deferring secondary scripts, CSS purging and tree-shaking to reduce the JS bundle size. Image optimization and related CMS functions also underwent overhauls in the pursuit of parformance gains.

Custom WebPageTest (WPT) automated testing running in multiple regions formed the basis of regular reporting about the sustained improvements.

Emirates, as a result of our close partnership on this project, now has one of the fastest airline homepages in the world, and the 15 second load time was reduced to a speedy 3.5.