Performance has played a crucial role in ensuring the responsiveness and functionalities of the application which leads to better end user experience and user engagements. It is vital for making the application scalable and maintainable in an efficient manner. Studies have shown the negative impact mediocre performance can have on business goals. High performing applications engage and retain users better than low performing ones. When we migrated Expedia Flights to Progressive web application, it enhanced the user experience and resulted in an increase in the demands at Expedia. However, the latency of Expedia Flights was too high, a standard monitoring of performance metrics was missing and there was a strong need to automate performance monitoring especially during releases which affected user retention and a seamless user experience.
Expedia Group is a leading global travel platform. Flight searches are a large chunk of user traffic on our platform. Flights search is traditionally a heavy system with peak search traffic going regularly in the large range of transactions per second. There is a latency overhead associated with each request which goes all the way down to the supplier. It was noticed that the airline information obtained from third parties further added to the latency. While optimizing the third-party APIs was not controllable, the goal was to optimize the network call and progressive web application for a seamless user experience. From the product analysis we found that a bad user experience leads to a drop in conversion and a higher page load time leads to a higher bounce rate as well. Better performance leads to higher user engagement and a reduction in overhead on both client & server side.
