About Pizza Hut
161 stores
2,000 employees
Top Brands is an independent Belgian restaurant group, with four top brands :
Pizza Hut, PAUL, Wasbar and Ellis.
Top Brands currently has 161 outlets and employs 2,000 staff. As a strong growing and innovative player in the food sector, they strive to surprise their customers every day with the best quality and outstanding service, a vision we at PHPro also share!
Pizza Hut websites overloaded: How we addressed the challenge of peak traffic
In 2016, Top Brands experienced major problems with Pizza Hut's websites: during major sporting events, the sites became inaccessible due to a platform that couldn't handle the spike in orders.
When PHPro took over responsibility for Pizza Hut's website that year, we began with a thorough analysis of the existing situation. We conducted a comprehensive audit, focusing on the website's application architecture, server infrastructure, code quality, speed and security. In addition, we examined the maintainability and scalability of the Web application.
Our analysis revealed two key areas for improvement: website performance on mobile devices was inadequate and overall usability left much to be desired. Both aspects turned out to be essential for increasing the conversion rate.
Redesign
After the performance issues were resolved, it quickly became clear that there was plenty of room for further improvements to the website. Together with our sister company Us, we developed a completely new design for Pizza Hut, focusing on conversion optimization and an improved mobile user experience (UX).
Through A/B testing, we ensured that the new design not only looks attractive, but is also extremely user-friendly. We also introduced several new features to make the pizza ordering process even easier and more efficient!
Since the launch of the improved webshop, the performance/speed has increased tremendously, and the mobile UX has also improved greatly. We ended the year with the highest number of mobile transactions per week ever. Very impressive, especially after the online boost we saw in covid lockdowns - Bart Van Dyck, E-commerce Manager at TopBrands, Pizza Hut.
Architectural adaptations for a high-performance and durable web application
Improvements were also needed on the back end of the website. The website was running on an outdated Zend framework and the code was difficult to maintain. Although we were temporarily held back by Covid in 2020, we then went back to full swing. In 2022, we migrated the web application to a state-of-the-art Next.js (React) frontend. The beating heart of the application is a Symfony API that provides communication with Pizza Hut's internal systems and allows the front-end to easily work with this data.
Why this setup? Next.js offers exceptional speed thanks to static Web pages and server-side rendering. The website functions as a Single Page Application (SPA), but is also available via URL, so it can still be indexed by search engines. We explained the benefits of an SPA in a previous blog. All content on the website is delivered through a headless CMS system in Drupal, which sends all the data to the Pizza Hut website. All these changes have made the application much faster and much easier to maintain now. This makes the application ready for the future and further developments.
Result
All these changes have made the application much faster now and also much easier to maintain. They now have a customized website that is ready for the future! In this first phase we have not yet taken performance optimization into account, and we are already getting page speed scores of 95%. So when we put additional focus on performance in the second phase, it will be even faster.
Do you also desire a super-fast digital platform?
Stop by and we'll spar together about your digital dreams!