Home furnishing retailer Dunelm has worked with cloud platform Fastly to boost its ecommerce performance.
Since re-platforming with Fastly’s edge cloud platform, Dunelm’s team has reported a 900% increase in web page load speeds, resulting in a 23% lift in basket performance.
Furthermore, Dunelm’s software engineers can now make over 200 software deployments each month, compared with just one previously. As a result, Dunelm’s engineering team is able to create, and continually improve upon, new digital shopping experiences amid increased popularity of online retail services.
Dunelm’s team of more than 200 engineers builds and manages a portfolio of applications, including a robust customer-facing ecommerce website and a suite of tools for internal use. In 2017, the engineering team, led by Tom Hayman, Head of Platform Engineering at Dunelm, looked to re-platform in order to meet the company’s ambitious online sales targets.
Dunelm’s team determined Fastly was best placed to support its requirements across several criteria.
“Consumer expectations are continually growing when it comes to online retail,” said Gonzalo de la Vega, VP Strategic Projects at Fastly. “User experience is business-critical. And this is underpinned by performance. During the nationwide lockdown, Dunelm saw new surges in web traffic and yet, web page load speeds increased by up to 900%. With a direct and significant impact on the retailer’s bottom line, the deployment of Fastly’s edge platform at Dunelm illustrates the importance of delivering a fast, seamless customer experience.”
In addition to improving the online customer experience, the platform engineering team needed the ability to deploy changes quickly. But Dunelm’s legacy CDN was not scalable and could support just one release per month.
“Purging our cache used to take 15 minutes, to one hour. With Fastly, it takes less than half a second. Fastly enables us to deliver 200 releases per month instead of only one. It’s a massive step up for our organization. Dunelm.com is now one of the fastest ecommerce platforms in the UK,” said Hayman.
