Squarespace launches entrepreneurs with fast, personalized experiences powered by Fastly

The challenge

As Squarespace celebrated 20 years in business, the maturing platform needed to differentiate itself from its competitors by introducing innovative features and securely delivering media and contents for its millions of customers to their billions of visitors, with reliable, blazing-fast speed. As a popular choice for entrepreneurs in search of stylish, modern websites with dynamic content delivery, it placed a premium on CDN reliability, speed, and the freedom to customize delivery.

The solution

In its quest to help all customers succeed at their businesses, Squarespace was drawn to Fastly’s CDN for its network architecture with hyper-connected, high-capacity points-of-presence (POPs), and lightning-fast purging. With Fastly, Squarespace ensures more content remains cached on the edge, improving performance, scale, and most-of-all, user experience. Additionally, Squarespace was pleased to discover they could configure and tweak their platform continuously on-demand. Fastly’s exemplary high-touch white glove customer service sealed the deal.

Delivering a stable platform and responsive customer service

Squarespace was drawn to Fastly because of its reliable and stable CDN. With customers depending on them to deliver responsive websites that load quickly on any device; state-of-the-art security; and protection from sudden outages, a lot was riding on finding the perfect CDN partner for Squarespace.

“Fastly was a critical partner when we launched our Super Bowl ad in February 2023 and saw it drive a magnitude of traffic all at once,” notes Yufeng Xiong, Squarespace Engineering Manager. “As our reliable CDN provider, Fastly seamlessly supported the influx of users flawlessly and without interruptions.”

Fastly’s expert and dependable customer experience stood out to Squarespace. “Fastly’s account managers and support team have been responsive, and willing to take the time to examine details,” Xiong said. “Their constant contact with us has made all the difference.”

Built-in security with no need to purchase extra solutions

Squarespace engineers have taken note of Fastly’s security by design. “The platform offers security without having to worry about our traffic, configuring an incident, or purchasing a separate service,” Xiong said.

Innovative programmable network allows for convenient self service

Fastly’s highly configurable network offers developers real-time configuration control, comprehensive APIs, stress-free rollbacks, and real-time logs for quick issue resolution, reducing dependence on professional services and release queues. Seamless integration with CI/CD cycles and DevOps tools enhances workflows and developer satisfaction.

“With the availability of the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), we actually built our asset protection feature. This is a key component of our platform and ensures our paid content that is hosted on public clients could not be shared globally. We were able to add our own authentication logic on the client and still be able to cache all the necessary content.”

“This flexible and powerful capability enables us to implement important product features that distinguish us from other web hosting companies,” Xiong said.

Key takeaway

Fastly’s superior CDN solution meant Squarespace could boost performance, reduce delivery costs, and improve developer productivity. The company embraced Fastly’s full self-serve configurability, allowing changes to easily pass from development to production. The powerful built-in VCL language allows us to customize our request and response logics with ease. We quickly implemented advanced features that other competitors don’t have, or couldn’t offer without paying 1-2x extra for such features.

“With Fastly, regardless of how busy our traffic becomes, it is always stable. There have never been any surprises, even during our biggest hours,” Xiong added. “The basic CDN service already has security features built-in, so we receive legitimate traffic to our services without having to do anything on our side and we get it for free.”