GigaOM Radar Edge Platform Leader & Outperformer 2024 | 
CUSTOMER SNAPSHOT
Discover How Edgio Supercharged Shoe Carnival's Sales and Performance
Shoe Carnival, one of the nation’s largest family footwear retailers, offers a broad assortment of dress, casual, and athletic brand-name footwear for men, women, and children.
Shoe Carnival's Challenge
With 80% of the retailer’s traffic coming from mobile devices, Shoe Carnival needed to move to a headless architecture that complimented their commerce platform and protected their customers.
“Edgio is a reliable partner for Shoe Carnival and using a unified solution that supports our site, performance, and security needs have been a game changer for us,” said Zimmerman. “With the addition of Edgio’s Security solutions, we now have greater visibility on potential vulnerabilities, fewer false positives, and the speed required to deploy new rules and address attempted attacks efficiently and effectively. Edgio’s Expert Services team also provided a quick and seamless implementation, and continues to provide the supported need to allow our technology team to stay focused on mission-critical tasks.”
Kent Zimmerman, VP, eCommerce & CRM – Shoe Carnival
Shoe Carnival's Solution
The retailer found what it required with advanced edge technology for building sub-second websites using Edgio Performance and Sites, supported by backend services from AWS. In addition, they’ve blocked millions of threats with Edgio Security, which was implemented less than a month before its critical Black Friday sales event.
Instant-loading pages on Edgio
ShoeCarnival.com went from 3.4-second first-page loads and 6-second browsing transitions to both being one second or less. On Edgio, first loads are 70.5% faster, with a one-second median load time. More importantly, subsequent page loads are cut by an astonishing 92%, down to 500ms.
Edgio makes instant page loads possible every time, with little to no additional dev work. “The platform is more flexible, user friendly, and takes all the guesswork out of deployments and caching,” stated Zimmerman.
Shoe Carnival has complete control over caching and traffic routing on Edgio. This, along with the platform’s Predictive Prefetch, which lets developers cache dynamic content at the edge and streams it to the browser before it is requested, ensures that ShoeCarnival.com delivers an exceptional, instant experience to its customers.
The bottom-line gains from the sub-second speeds were felt immediately. “Right away, we saw a lift in conversions and average order value (AOV),” reported Zimmerman. Speed equals money, but that’s not all it influences. Site speed also impacts search engine optimization (SEO).
“On Edgio, we have a faster user experience with better conversions. From a developer’s standpoint, we have far more flexibility and no restrictions.”
Kent Zimmerman, VP, eCommerce & CRM – Shoe Carnival
Instant made simple
From a technical perspective, Edgio simplifies the process of building, testing, optimizing, and running large eCommerce websites. Shoe Carnival can now develop and release new features in a fraction of the time it used to take them.
Edgio puts performance code in the center of the team’s workflow. It simplifies the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows, enabling automated testing and feedback cycles with unique URLs for every branch created. Once live, Edgio lets the team easily monitor site performance and caching at various levels of granularity so that every optimization effort is maximized.
Zimmerman and team are able to squeeze every millisecond out of every speed optimization effort — while simplifying workflow through advanced technology built into Edgio Performance and Sites. Capabilities include Server-Side Rendering support for portable frontends, predictive prefetching, and CDN-as-JavaScript to deliver a 95%+ cache hit ratio for dynamic content at the edge.
Unified performance and security solutions
After experiencing a coordinated DDoS attack, Shoe Carnival realized it needed to enhance its security defenses – preferably under one provider and quickly before its Black Friday sales event.
Edgio’s Expert Services team promptly implemented Edgio’s comprehensive Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solution, including WAF, DDoS Protection, and Bot Management products. Initially, the solution was deployed in “alert only” mode to learn from site traffic and identify common threats. The process was aided using Edgio’s unique Dual-WAAP that allows DevSecOps teams to test security updates on production traffic easily and without fear of impacting normal application behavior. In all, the entire security onboarding and implementation, from initial tuning to production with all protections on, took less than a month and was completed well in advance of Shoe Carnival’s Black Friday sales event.
In one month alone, Edgio’s WAAP blocked over 8 million malicious requests, protecting Shoe Carnival and its customers from a variety of attacks that ranged from fairly simple to highly complex and automated. By having real-time visibility into threats, with the confidence to accurately block malicious requests, Shoe Carnival is able to provide its customers with a faster and more secure online shopping experience while protecting customer data and its bottom line.
“The speed [on Edgio] was so much faster than other solutions that we evaluated. This was unique to this platform.”
Kent Zimmerman, VP, eCommerce & CRM – Shoe Carnival
Benefits
- Global CDN that powers 4% of the internet and reaches customers around the world in milliseconds
- Build and release secure web applications in half the time
- De-risk and speed up the time to value of digital transformation to a modern architecture
- Massive scale and resiliency to ensure uptime and performance against cyber attacks, especially during the biggest sales events
- Real-time threat detection, security analytics, and rapid rule updates to keep customers’ personal information protected and mitigate security exploits 85% faster
- Improve site speed and customer experience to attract, retain, and grow revenue and customer satisfaction
- Expert Service team to onboard customer traffic and manage project timeline
AWS helps Edgio customers achieve the highest levels of performance and security by providing:
- Scalability and Cost Savings: AWS effortlessly scales for highly variable workloads without needing new hardware, reducing complexity along with significant cost savings that Edgio passes on to customers.
- Agility: AWS’s automation allows for quick spin-up and down of resources, making it ideal for proof of concepts and early product development.
- Single Tenant: Using AWS Orgs and Control Tower, Edgio offers a highly secure, single-tenant environment for customers who need isolation for regulatory, compliance and testing needs (such as load testing, pentesting, etc.).
- Compliance: Leveraging AWS simplifies and reduces the cost of maintaining regulatory compliance across workloads.
