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.”

Workers enables efficient page personalization

Alpred provides page personalization for visitors using cookies. For example, if a user previously checked the weather in London, the page would automatically show London’s weather on their next visit.

Alpred used to implement this personalization using JavaScript, but this was a clunky solution that negatively hurt the site’s SEO. JavaScript can only run once the user is on the page, so all changes applied for personalization harmed page load speeds.

Workers enables Alpred to customize content via the network rather than inside the browser. This reduces page load speeds and has a positive impact on page SEO. According to Navarro, “In general, the first result on Google gets a majority of the clicks. By improving our SEO score, Cloudflare helps us to more reliably capture organic search traffic and ad revenue.”

Switching to Workers has also improved the developer experience and is critical to the success of new initiatives. Navarro says, “If something is very important to the company’s strategic plan, then we say it needs to be implemented in Workers.”

Alpred has also explored other Cloudflare solutions to improve page personalization and the user experience. For example, Cloudflare Image Optimization automatically selects image sizes and formats based on the user’s browser. This improves the user experience and prevents Alpred from being penalized by search engines for poor responsiveness.

Protecting highly visible sites from cyber threats

Alpred manages many high-visibility domains, such as meteored.com and theweather.com, that are prime targets for cyber attacks. The Cloudflare WAF protects against bot attacks and other threats that could degrade performance for legitimate users. According to Navarro, “Security is very important for Alpred S.L since Meteored offers personalized services 24/7 to clients and companies. Using Cloudflare, we ensure the availability of the service, as well as protection against attacks and security of our data."

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a primary concern due to their impact on Meteored's availability and the user experience. After moving services behind Cloudflare’s DDoS protection, this was no longer a concern. According to Navarro, “We experience DDoS attacks every week, every month, and Cloudflare stops these attacks for us.”

Continuous improvement and innovation

Alpred is looking forward to a long partnership with Cloudflare and is excited to see how Cloudflare solutions can help it to better serve its users in new ways. According to Navarro. “We’re very excited about the level of personalization that Workers enables. We’re currently looking into using it to provide news tailored to a user’s unique interests, and we see Cloudflare being instrumental to our development processes for a long time to come.”