Edgemesh's 5x faster time-to-first-byte with Compute@Edge | Fastly

In ecommerce, speed is everything. Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) and page-load time correlate highly with bounce rates, which gives businesses a simple choice: make it fast or forget it.

Edgemesh solves this problem for ecommerce customers and others by essentially offering speed-as-a-service via its client-side optimization platform and Edgemesh Server. With the headless Edgemesh environment, customers enjoy site-delivery times that are anywhere from two to 10 times faster than before, leading to more traffic and more sales.

Compute, our serverless compute platform, gives Edgemesh the performance it needs to accelerate its customers' websites. Built on our modern edge network — which allows for advanced caching — Compute sits between single- or multi-origin clouds and companies' end users, empowering developers to run code in a safe, microsecond execution environment, at scale and at the edge. This means Edgemesh-supported apps and websites can be highly personalized and instantly deliver high-quality immersive experiences. 

Promising early results

Since moving to Compute, Edgemesh has achieved impressive results for customers, including:

• 5x improvement in TTFB, 

• 2.5x reduction in request times at the median, and

• Half an order of magnitude reduction in tail latency.

Some individual customers have done even better: one reported a drop in request time from 590-865 ms to 60-85 ms, a decrease of nearly 90%.

Compute enables Edgemesh to use domain unsharding, also known as connection coalescing, to limit the number of TCP connections and dramatically accelerate response times and page loads of their customers’ sites. 

"I don't know how we would do that without the ability to run code at the edge itself,” Jake Loveless, Edgemesh’s CEO, told us. 

In the highly competitive world of ecommerce, time is literally money. Site speed impacts conversion rates, search engine rankings, and repeat business. And every second counts — improving site speed by just one second can increase conversion rates by 3.3% on desktop and 5.7% on mobile, reduce bounce rates by 12.2% on both desktop and mobile, and increase pageviews by 0.52 pages on desktop and 0.38 pages on mobile, according to eCommerce Speed Hub’s Site Speed Standard data. This is why it’s important for Edgemesh to achieve better performance for customers, and to do so as quickly as possible. 

Quick and easy implementation

Edgemesh achieved some of those metrics within the first weeks of using Compute, a result they credit to the ease of integrating it into their DevOps processes. Because the platform is API-first, they could fold it into existing operations and automate deployments. 

"When the purpose of your code is performance, you want to be sure your interaction with that system is first class,” Jake told us. “Compared to the alternatives, we're much more deeply integrated, and that shows in our performance metrics.”

Customers noticed the difference right away. Several reported a clear jump in conversion rates after Edgemesh’s implementation of Compute — one customer achieved their first million-dollar month in history. 

Customers also reported an increase in organic traffic — as much as 50% — thanks to Edgmesh Server's fully automatic dynamic rendering, which serves an optimized static HTML version of a site to index bots, while continuing to provide human customers a highly interactive, immersive versionEdgemesh plans to expand its use of Compute over time, Jake told us. "Every day, we're moving more and more of the Edgemesh platform over to Fastly, as fast as we can.” 

Curious to learn more about how Compute helps Edgemesh? Read the full case study.

The Edge Advantage

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