Manduka

Manduka uses Cloudflare to optimize the performance of its Shopify store as traffic grows post-pandemic

Based in Los Angeles, Manduka provides responsibly produced yoga mats, equipment, and apparel to consumers and yoga studios worldwide. The company strives to provide a best-in-class user experience on its website so that both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers can quickly find what they’re looking for and have a smooth purchase process.

Challenge: Reduce page load times and minimize the complexity of site customization

Manduka had replatformed their website to Shopify from a previous ecommerce solution, primarily because the company had found the other platform to be too complex and labor-intensive, especially as the company’s B2C business dramatically increased due to COVID-19 and the surge of new at-home workout routines.

However, even after migrating, Manduka’s in-house and third-party apps continued to hurt page load times. It was also difficult to customize the site for Manduka’s B2C and B2B customers, who visit the same storefront but are presented with slightly different user experiences.

“It’s no secret that faster page load times equal more conversions,” explains Justin Burrow, Senior Manager, Digital at Manduka. “My job is to ensure a best-in-class user experience. I make sure that our site is easy to use and as fast as possible.”

When Paul Zaengle, Manduka’s new CEO came on board in late 2020, he suggested that the company use Cloudflare based on previous positive experiences with their product. Manduka deployed the Cloudflare CDN through Orange-to-Orange (O2O), which enables Shopify merchants to use their Cloudflare account to proxy web traffic through Cloudflare with an Enterprise plan. Manduka also signed up for Workers, Cloudflare’s serverless computing solution, to simplify site customization and further improve page load speeds by moving app processes to the network edge.

Cloudflare O2O and Cloudflare Workers substantially improve site performance and internal efficiency

After a quick and seamless deployment of the Cloudflare CDN and O2O, Manduka saw a 50% reduction in latency year-over-year, even though traffic to the company’s store has increased significantly in that time.

“By halving our latency, the combination of Shopify and Cloudflare O2O ensures that Manduka’s customers have a great user experience, and our conversion rates remain high, even as traffic to our site increases,” Burrow says.

With Cloudflare O2O in place, Manduka is now experimenting with Cloudflare Workers to further improve site performance. Workers lets developers and organizations quickly deploy custom code — ranging from new app processes to entirely new applications — to Cloudflare’s network. Currently, Manduka uses Workers to move app processes previously loaded within Shopify templates to that network, which improves performance.

“Even the small things we’ve done with Workers, having it handle certain app processes, have had a noticeable impact on page load times and the user experience.”

Manduka wants to use Workers to optimize a Javascript app that runs in tandem with Shopify and alters the site experience depending on whether the customer is a consumer or a business.

“This app is massive, and it contributes to latency,” Burrow explains. “The more processes we can defer to Workers, the faster the site will load, enhancing the user experience and boosting conversion rates.”

Burrow reports that Manduka's partnership with Cloudflare has improved internal efficiency. “If we didn’t have Cloudflare, my team would have to spend a lot of time manually investigating all of the many things that can impact page load times, then manually fixing all of them. Cloudflare O2O fixes most problems, and Cloudflare’s performance analytics pinpoint areas of improvement on our end.”

Cloudflare is an integral part of Manduka’s quest to pursue innovation through technology in all areas of its business as the company enters the post-pandemic digital era. “Manduka is known for our innovations in yoga equipment and apparel. We want to mirror that spirit of innovation with our IT development and ecommerce experience while being cognizant of our in-house resources,” Burrow explains. “Our partnership with Cloudflare enables us to leverage technology for continuous improvement without draining our internal resources. Cloudflare is enabling us to forge into new, uncharted territory, and we’re excited to see where the future will take us.”