Expedia made flight search faster by up to 52% (page usable time) by applying a range of optimizations to web and mobile applications. To support these improvements, the company improved the observability of its applications. Expedia Flights web application has been migrated to Micro Frontend Architecture (MFA) to allow flexibility, reusability, and better optimization.
Expedia made flight search faster by up to 52% (page usable time) by applying a range of optimizations to web and mobile applications. To support these improvements, the company improved the observability of its applications. Expedia Flights web application has been migrated to Micro Frontend Architecture (MFA) to allow flexibility, reusability, and better optimization.
Flight searches represent a large portion of Expedia’s user traffic. As the company can’t directly control the latency of 3rd-party APIs, it decided to optimize network calls and its progressive web application (PWA) to improve user experience.
The team improved observability across the frontend and backend components to support and guide performance optimizations. Engineers identified and started tracking multiple metrics, including page usable time (the load time of the React component), non-supply overhead (overall backend call latency, excluding 3rd-party API calls), first contentful paint (FCP), time to interactive (TTI), etc.
Reduction in Latency (Source: Expedia Technology Blog)
One of the fundamental steps that altered the structure of Expedia Flights PWA was adopting the Micro Frontend Architecture (MFA).
