Meteored

Alpred provides personalized weather data around the world with help from Cloudflare

Alpred began in 1999 as a way for its founders to share their love of meteorology online. They acquired the meteored.com domain and began sharing links to meteorological data. Since then, the company has expanded dramatically, acquiring 26 domains and developing mobile apps. Alpred not only provides weather data for users around the world but also hosts sports news. Page speed and performance are critical to Alpred’s ability to compete with other weather and sports news providers.

Challenge: Optimizing page performance and the user experience

Alpred provides location-specific weather data to a global audience, with over 320 million unique annual visitors to its sites from 70 countries. In a highly competitive market, a positive user experience is essential to ensure that visitors choose Meteored over alternatives.

In 2016, Alpred was experiencing issues with latency and page load speeds for its South American audience. This latency negatively impacted the page’s search engine optimization (SEO) and the user experience, increasing the probability that visitors would choose a competing site.

Additionally, Alpred needed an effective solution for personalizing and localizing weather data for users around the globe. While it could do so with JavaScript, this approach had negative repercussions for page load speed and SEO.

Load balancing enhances the user experience

Addressing issues with network latency was a primary reason why the company chose to deploy Cloudflare Load Balancing and CDN. According to José Antonio Jiménez Pérez, Alpred’s CTO, “Before Cloudflare, our users in Brazil and Argentina would experience over a second of latency in page loads. Thanks to Cloudflare, we have reduced our latency to milliseconds and offer a quick response in any country in the world, which allows us to continue our expansion to more countries."

This decreased latency is vital to the user experience and Alpred’s ability to compete with similar sites. It is also invaluable for SEO, as search engines commonly penalize websites with slow page load speeds. Adrián Martínez Navarro, Alpred’s COO, says, “Cloudflare helps us improve our Core Web Vitals, which are a very important factor in the positioning of our websites.”