Optimizely Harnesses Cloudflare Workers to Reinvent Web Optimization

If you’re looking to grow your business online, there’s no substitute for running objective tests to see how your website is performing. Optimizely is one of the world’s leading experimentation platforms — with thousands of customers including global brands like IBM, HP, and Microsoft — who cumulatively deliver billions of experiences every week.

These tests help Optimizely’s customers improve everything from their website layout, to copy, to identifying which products have the most growth potential.

Optimizely offers a straightforward, easy way to get up and running on its platform: simply drop its Javascript snippet into your website header. This approach has helped drive Optimizely’s popularity — and has served its customers well. However, it comes with tradeoffs.

Because the Javascript is loaded in the website’s header, it has to download and execute before the page itself can render. This typically happens so quickly that users don’t notice a difference. But as Optimizely’s customers add more and more tests to their pages, this Javascript can take longer to load. In other words, there’s a tradeoff between how many tests Optimizely’s customers can run, and the potential impact on performance.

The Cloudflare Difference

When Optimizely heard about Cloudflare’s new Workers platform, it realized there was an opportunity to develop a robust new implementation of its experimentation platform — one that would still be easy for its customers to install, but that doesn’t come with the same tradeoffs in performance.

Cloudflare Workers allows developers to leverage Cloudflare’s global network — spanning over 330 cities in 90 countries worldwide — to deploy and execute their own code, in the programming language of their choice. This allows developers to do everything from customizing Cloudflare’s own products, to developing entirely new applications that perform complex logic at the network edge.

When Optimizely’s customers use this new, Workers-powered implementation of its experimentation platform, they can now concurrently run ten or even one hundred times as many tests without a noticeable impact on performance. That’s because the test logic runs on the servers on Cloudflare’s edge network, rather than in the user’s browser. And because Cloudflare has servers within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world — those tests are blazing fast.

Want more of the technical details? Learn more from our joint blog post and Optimizely’s press release announcing Performance Edge, powered by Cloudflare Workers.

Transcript

Claire Vo, SVP of Product: Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation platform. Our customers come to Optimizely, quite frankly, to grow their business.

Whelan Boyd, Senior Product Manager: They are able to test all of their assumptions and make more decisions based on insights and data.

Claire Vo: We serve some of the largest enterprises in the world, and those enterprises have quite high standards for the scalability and performance of the products that Optimizely is bringing into their organization.

Greeshma Yellareddy, Senior Performance Engineer: We have a Javascript snippet that goes on customers’ websites that executes all the experiments that they have configured, all the changes that they have configured for any of the experiments.

Lauren Pappone, Senior Software Engineer: That Javascript takes time to download, to parse, and also to execute and so customers have become increasingly performance conscious.

Claire Vo: The reason we partnered with Cloudflare is to improve the performance aspects of some of our core experimentation products.

Whelan Boyd: We needed a way to push this kind of decision making and computation out to the edge. And Workers ultimately surfaced as the no-brainer tool of choice there.

Lauren Pappone: Once we started using Workers it was really fast to get up to speed. It was like, “Oh, I can just go into this playground and write Javascript which I totally know how to do — and then it just works. So that was pretty cool.”

Whelan Boyd: Our customers will be able to run 10x, 100x the number of experiments. And from our perspective that ultimately means they’ll get more value out of it. And the business impact for our bottom line and our top line, will also start to mirror that as well.

Claire Vo: Workers has allowed us to accelerate our product velocity around performance innovation which I’m very excited about. But that’s just the beginning. There’s a lot that Cloudflare is doing from a technology perspective that we’re really excited to partner on so that we can bring our innovation to market faster.