River Island keeps customer experience a cut above with Fastly's high-performance CDN, Next-Gen WAF, and Bot Management

The challenge

What makes a fashion website outstanding? First, it has to look great, with fast-loading images and videos for product pages, lookbooks, and social content. It has to be secure, both to protect customers' PI and to prevent bot traffic from slowing down the site. And it has to be dynamic, so a retailer can innovate on the customer experience the same way it leads in fashion.

To continue delivering reliable, exciting shopping experiences for its customers, River Island needed more performance from its CDN and better protection from its security solutions.

The solution

"Fastly solved three major problems for us: we got a high-performance CDN, an easy-to-use Next-Gen WAF, and a reliable bot management solution," said David Edwards, Head of Technology at River Island. “Previously we were using multiple CDNs and WAF and were keen to consolidate so that we can standardise across all teams, simplify the architecture, reduce costs and have a single throat to choke.” Edwards views Fastly as a strategic partner enabling River Island to shift from reactive mode to proactively innovating ahead of technology trends.

Improved CDN performance

River Island was eager to take its caching strategy to the next level, and Fastly offered the ecommerce company the tools to do it. Features like Cache Control, Shielding, and Custom VCL helped River Island demonstrably improve performance in load testing and start shaving milliseconds from page-load times. "We are really impressed with the caching capabilities available to us through Fastly and the new opportunities available through VCL," said Edwards. "It's still early days, but we're already seeing improvements of 50-100 milliseconds per page."

Improved security posture

Edwards described River Island's former WAF as a black box with a lot of rules but only a handful of people to demystify them. "We wanted to simplify and adopt a more templated, democratized approach to security, and that's what Fastly has allowed us to do," Edwards said. "It's a big improvement for us." River Island was also seeing increased activity from malicious actors. Using Fastly Bot Management, the fashion retailer reduced bot traffic without slowing or stopping legitimate users. "Fastly gave us a sophisticated and intelligent bot management solution so we could defend against the constant threats we were under," Edwards said. River Island plans to implement TLS fingerprinting next, using Fastly-supported JA3 tokens.

Improved developer experience

Staying in front of the competition in the domain of customer experience requires agility: responding rapidly, innovating quickly, and pivoting smoothly. River Island developers now have that capability because they are working with developer-centric solutions. "Culturally, Fastly is a great fit for us. Our developers love it, because the solutions have been built from the ground up to work for them," said Edwards. Great documentation and communication have also set up River Island for success. "The relationship with Fastly has been excellent from the start," Edwards said, "and it's allowed us to change our entire approach. Instead of chasing our tails, everything is in pipelines, it's all tested, and it's all repeatable. We've been able to democratize the CDN and WAF, so the responsibility is shared by all of our development teams, which has been great."

Key takeaways

River Island gained the performance, security, and great developer experience needed to stay at the forefront of online retail by partnering with Fastly. Using Fastly's high-performance CDN, Next-Gen WAF, and Bot Management solution, the company has cut its website's page-load time, leveled up its caching strategy, streamlined its security approach, and empowered its developers to work proactively. "One of the really important things we do at River Island is make the right strategic partnerships," Edwards said. "We're excited to see the opportunities for innovation that arise from our partnership with Fastly."