For eCommerce platforms, performance and security are crucial. Faster websites lead to higher conversion rates, and eCommerce sites must be secure to maintain consumer confidence and regulatory compliance. AllSaints turned to Cloudflare for both performance and security at a workable price point.
AllSaints is a leading British fashion retailer that's been selling high-quality men's and women's apparel, footwear, and accessories since 1994. The company is truly global, with over 200 brick-and-mortar stores worldwide in 27 countries — and many customers buy AllSaints products via its localized e-commerce platforms.
AllSaints was dissatisfied with its previous vendor. Despite paying premium prices, it was seeing minimal performance improvements. "The CDN was incredibly expensive, and I don't think we got much out of it," says Andy Dean, Technical Operations Manager at AllSaints. "We didn't see many performance gains, and it was a very limited toolset."
AllSaints needed more than a CDN: it also needed a way to accelerate dynamic content (like customer shopping carts), and a way to bolster security to safeguard consumer confidence and ensure PCI and GDPR compliance.
AllSaints looked at a number of CDN providers. None offered the simple pricing, the customization, the easy deployment, the tools, and the overall performance that Cloudflare offered.
The global footprint of the Cloudflare CDN, which caches content in over 180 data centers around the world, was crucial to the decision to deploy Cloudflare. "We wanted to leverage the local Cloudflare PoPs," says Dean. “We currently host our US website out of London, so making sure we had global points of presence with a CDN that could serve content more locally than London was a huge factor."
Optimizing image delivery is also key, because AllSaints is unwilling to compromise on image quality for the sake of faster load times. "The CDN is important for our high-resolution images," says Dean. "When you're selling clothes, people want to look at the details, so we didn't want to scale down the quality of the images just to save on size." With the Cloudflare CDN, they're able to deliver images to customers much faster for a better experience that doesn't undercut content quality.
AllSaints uses Argo Smart Routing to further boost the performance of dynamic content that can’t be cached. Argo uses Cloudflare’s unique vantage point — evaluating traffic performance from over 16 million web properties — to route around network congestion.
With these technologies and the CDN packaged in their solution, performance is no longer a concern for AllSaints, even during times of high traffic: Dean notes that "one of our quickest times was during Black Friday."
Security is also essential for safeguarding consumer trust, which is why AllSaints leverages the Cloudflare WAF and SSL services to secure their web properties. SSL ensures all pages are encrypted, not just checkout pages. The WAF enables AllSaints to not only block vulnerability exploits directed at its eCcommerce sites, but also to write its own custom rules to filter out undesirable traffic. While other vendors charged extra for security, Cloudflare includes it.
The Cloudflare WAF has blocked as many as 88,000 attacks on AllSaints in a 24-hour period. Additionally, it's easy for AllSaints to enforce SSL across all web properties from the Cloudflare dashboard. "Being able to enforce strict SSL policies is really useful," says Dean. "Obviously that helps with customer confidence as well."
• 80% of web content is served by Cloudflare’s CDN, resulting in sizable savings on bandwidth costs.
• 32% of AllSaints traffic is handled by Argo, resulting in an additional 21% performance gain overall.
• The Cloudflare WAF has blocked as many as 88,000 attacks on AllSaints in a 24-hour period.
“Speed is a huge factor in customer conversion — one of our team’s core goals to sustain business growth is making sure all of our sites are fast and responsive. Cloudflare has helped us achieve that, and much more.”
Andy Dean
Technical Operations Manager, AllSaints