Ranked #2 in the Industry: The Engineering Behind Under Armour's Digital Experience
Under Armour scored 95 out of 100 in the 2025 Catchpoint Digital Experience Benchmark — ahead of Nike, Adidas, and 16 other major brands. Here's the work behind it.
In October 2025, Catchpoint published their annual Digital Experience Benchmark for athletic footwear and apparel. They tested 20 brands across 123 monitoring locations worldwide — cloud, mobile networks, residential broadband, the works. Not self-reported. Not a survey. Real measurements of what real customers actually experience.
Under Armour scored a 95 out of 100. Second overall, one point behind Fila Holdings. Ahead of Nike (53), Adidas (58), New Balance (91), and everyone else.
I was part of the platform team that built the foundation behind that score. Here's what went into it.
The numbers that matter
The benchmark measured eight things: availability, page load time, response time, TTFB, LCP, CLS, DNS lookup, and document complete — weighted by business impact. They grouped the results into four tiers: Leading (90+), Strong (83-89), Competitive (66-82), and Challenged (below 66).
Sixteen out of twenty brands scored below 66. The industry median load time was 6.6 seconds — more than double the 3-second standard. UA's group averaged 2.6 seconds.
The gap between top and bottom was 320%. Nike, generating nearly $50 billion annually, ranked #16.
What we built
Scores like this don't come from one project. They compound. Here's what I contributed:
Smarter caching. I reworked how our CMS API calls were handled — reducing redundant server requests significantly. Fewer requests means faster pages. At UA's scale, shaving calls off the critical path has direct dollar-value impact.
Module architecture. I led the pivot to how page modules were built on the Seabiscuit platform and served as primary developer on CMS integration. The architecture we established means pages load progressively and components don't block the critical rendering path. That directly affects LCP and document complete — two of the eight benchmark metrics.
The PDP redesign. Our six-month rebuild of the product detail page treated performance as a constraint, not an afterthought. Lazy loading, optimized assets, careful third-party script management.
Duplicate content fix. I found and resolved a duplicate content issue affecting SEO indexing — improving both discoverability and page quality signals.
Why it matters
In ecommerce, performance is revenue. The report estimated Nike loses $200M+ annually from downtime alone. Adidas, $225M+. Meanwhile, the correlation between load speed and experience score across all 20 brands was -0.829 — near-perfect. Speed and experience are effectively the same thing.
Catchpoint classified UA as an "alignment champion" — a brand that successfully converts raw technical performance into actual customer experience. We didn't just have fast infrastructure. We turned it into something customers could feel.
Digitally influenced sales now represent 62% of all U.S. retail. By 2027, it'll be 70%. The teams that treat performance as a product feature — not a cleanup task — are the ones setting the pace.
I'm proud of what we built. Not because of the ranking, but because of the culture behind it — a team where performance was everyone's concern, every sprint, every review.