Fastly: a cloud platform to speed up your website

In today's digital world, website loading speed is an essential, yet often underestimated, factor. Every second counts, every millisecond can make a difference. A slow site can lead to a drop in traffic, lower conversions, and, consequently, reduced revenue. Fortunately, solutions exist to improve this speed, and Fastly is one of the most high-performing. We explain it all!

What is Fastly?

Fastly: definition and history

Fastly is much more than just a CDN (Content Delivery Network); it’s a scalable cloud platform designed to enhance the performance, security, and reliability of your website. Founded in 2011 by Artur Bergman, a developer passionate about online performance optimization, Fastly has since evolved into one of the leading content delivery platforms on the market.

Description of CDN (Content Delivery Network) technology

At the heart of Fastly lies CDN technology, a global network of servers that delivers web content based on geographic proximity. When a user requests a webpage, the request is automatically routed to the nearest server, reducing latency and speeding up site loading. Thanks to this technology, Fastly enables faster, smoother delivery of your online content.

One clarification saves a lot of disappointment: a CDN speeds up what it can cache. Images, stylesheets, scripts and static pages are served from the nearest point of presence; a page personalised per user or a database query is not, those go back to the origin server. So a CDN mainly improves the initial response time and asset delivery, which weighs on Largest Contentful Paint. It does not fix an Interaction to Next Paint degraded by too much JavaScript, nor a layout shift caused by images without dimensions. All three are measured at the 75th percentile of real visits, with thresholds of 2.5 seconds, 200 milliseconds and 0.1.

How Fastly fits into the cloud computing ecosystem

But Fastly is more than just a CDN. In the vast cloud computing ecosystem, Fastly stands out with its comprehensive suite of services designed to enhance every aspect of your online presence. Beyond its CDN functionality, Fastly also offers performance optimization, security, edge computing, and video streaming services, to name just a few of its strengths.

Fastly’s integration into the cloud computing landscape goes far beyond that of a simple CDN. As an all-in-one platform for accelerating, securing, and optimizing your website, Fastly is a key player in the cloud universe.

Why choose Fastly to speed up your website?

Accelerating a website isn’t just about improving loading speed, it’s a significant competitive advantage in today’s ultra-competitive digital market. Fastly, as a cloud platform, provides an integrated solution to this challenge. But how, exactly?

Fastly’s benefits for loading speed

First and foremost, one of Fastly’s key strengths is its ability to significantly increase your website’s loading speed. Thanks to its global network of Points of Presence (PoPs), Fastly enables faster, more efficient content delivery, minimizing the delay between a user’s request and the server’s response. By reducing this latency, your website loads more quickly, directly contributing to a better user experience.

Fastly’s impact on user experience (UX)

Indeed, user experience (UX) has become a critical factor for websites. Fast loading speeds mean visitors won’t have to wait to access your content. This leads to lower bounce rates, increased time spent on the site, and an overall improvement in user satisfaction. Fastly thus plays a decisive role in enhancing your website’s UX.

Fastly use cases (real-world examples of sites using it)

Many globally recognized sites have adopted Fastly to boost their performance. For example, The New York Times, one of the world’s most visited online publications, uses Fastly to ensure fast, reliable content delivery to millions of readers every day. Similarly, Pinterest, the image-sharing platform, relies on Fastly to quickly load its vast number of images and provide users with a smooth, enjoyable experience. These use cases demonstrate Fastly’s potential to accelerate the performance of websites of all sizes and types.

Differences between Fastly and other CDNs

Compared to other CDNs, Fastly stands out for its flexibility and scalability. While most CDNs rely on static infrastructure, Fastly uses a dynamic architecture that can be easily adapted to your website’s specific needs. Additionally, Fastly allows you to configure and adjust caching, security, and routing rules in real time, providing unprecedented control over your website’s performance.

That centralisation has a flip side, and it has a date. On 8 June 2021, a software bug triggered by one customer’s configuration change caused 85% of Fastly’s network to return errors, taking a large number of major sites offline simultaneously. The detail is instructive: monitoring detected the incident within one minute, 95% of the network was operating normally 49 minutes later, and the incident was fully mitigated by 12:35 UTC. Two lessons for an architecture decision, a provider is judged as much on its time to recover as on its advertised uptime, and a site whose entire traffic passes through a single intermediary inherits that intermediary’s outages. Hence the value of knowing, before the incident, what your site shows when the CDN stops answering.

Fastly and Webflow: a winning combination for optimal web performance

Webflow, as a website creation platform, constantly strives to provide users with tools and services that enhance the quality and efficiency of their sites. And when it comes to performance and loading speed, Fastly emerges as the partner of choice.

By combining Webflow’s web design capabilities with Fastly’s fast content delivery technology, you can create visually appealing websites that load at exceptional speeds. Not only does this improve the user experience, but it can also positively impact your search engine rankings, as loading speed can indirectly affect your position on Google.

Integrating Fastly with your Webflow site is a relatively simple process, involving just a few technical configurations. Once Fastly is integrated, all your Webflow site’s content is automatically distributed via Fastly’s network, ensuring fast and reliable delivery, regardless of your visitors’ location.

Using Fastly with Webflow offers additional benefits such as protection against DDoS attacks, improved site reliability and availability, and the ability to handle traffic spikes without service interruptions.

Choose a sleek and ultra-fast website with Scroll agency

Need an ultra-fast, high-performance, and up-to-date website? At Scroll, our Webflow agency is here to take your website to the next level! Our Webflow experts will work with you to develop a site that perfectly meets your expectations and loads in the blink of an eye! If you have a project, get in touch with us!