Upwork ($UPWK) is the leading online talent solution transforming professional staffing. Upwork empowers businesses with more flexible access to quality talent on demand. Through Upwork’s matching technology and services, companies have access to a global pool of proven professionals so they can scale their teams dynamically to meet business needs. Upwork also provides professionals access to more opportunities.
Upwork’s mission is to create economic opportunities so people have better lives. The community of independent professionals working via Upwork spans many categories including software development, creative and design, finance and accounting, consulting, operations and customer support — over 8,000 skills are represented.
Upwork is the “child” of two separate freelance platforms: oDesk, founded in 2003, and Elance, founded in 1998. In 2013, the companies merged to create Elance-oDesk, then later rebranded as Upwork.
The rebranding coincided with a major platform upgrade that presented technical challenges. Among the most vexing was the task of redirecting approximately 150,000 URLs from the oDesk and Elance domains. “Many of these URLs weren’t being redirected, resulting in some visitors receiving errors,” recalls Wilson Chong, Sr. Director of Reliability Engineering.
This situation was completely unacceptable from an SEO perspective and, more importantly, a user experience standpoint.
The job had to be done. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to implement such big changes to meet the deadline. It would have required hundreds of hours of manual work. Upwork knew they’d need to find some help.
“We were thinking we’d have to redirect all 150,000 URLs manually, one by one, which would have been nearly impossible,” says Chong.
Turning to Cloudflare for help was a natural step; Upwork’s partnership with Cloudflare had begun early on for both companies. “We were one of Cloudflare’s early partners,” recalls Chong. “When I first joined Upwork 3.5 years ago, we were already using their CDN and DDoS protection, along with other products to speed up site performance. Given our long history of success with Cloudflare, we felt confident that they could provide us with a solution to our bulk redirect problem.”
The answer to Upwork’s dilemma was Cloudflare’s serverless platform, Cloudflare Workers — which empowered Upwork to complete its massive bulk redirect project quickly, efficiently, and accurately. Workers allows developers to deploy custom code to Cloudflare’s network edge, using the programming languages they’re already familiar with.