Bidu gets 30% more leads year over year through improved speed and security from Cloudflare.

Bidu is one of the first online property insurance companies in Brazil, helping more than 1 million people to protect their property. Bidu’s main business goal is to bring insurance to the modern age by incorporating the latest technology into their product to make getting insurance as easy as possible.

Renato Menegasso, Head of Technology at Bidu, related that for Bidu “it’s not just about selling insurance, but selling it with knowledge and clarity to the customer. We want people to understand the fine print and know what they are buying.”

Bidu’s Challenge: Speed & Security Fit for the Insurance Industry

Bidu started an initiative to improve their SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure that they had the highest possible placement in front of the eyes of potential customers. During this process Bidu learned that slow performance and site latency were bringing down search ranks. Menegasso explained “Speed is necessary to show that we’re a reliable website and we have what it takes to do business online. Our search rankings are directly related to how fast our site is.” Web performance also affected Bidu’s customers— Menegasso elaborated, “we have almost 100 fields on our online application so people come onto our website, fill out information, fill out more information, and then they get a quote. The longer it takes to load the fields and for our customers to complete the application the less likely they are to finish it and submit.” Bidu was thus in search of a Internet performance partner that also had the security they needed to be best-in-class for the insurance industry.

Bidu's Solution: A Strong and High-Performing Security Partner

“We sell through 8 different insurance carriers, and we can now deliver a quote to a customer in 30 seconds thanks to Cloudflare” said Menegasso. He continued, “this is absolutely extraordinary and necessary for our business. It makes all the difference. If we didn’t have this speed, then more people would drop and our bounce rate would be higher.” Bidu decided on using Cloudflare because Cloudflare offered both a high performing global network with Data Centers across Latin America and an advanced suite of security tools at a reasonable price and the ability to manage everything through the same dashboard. Bidu now enjoys an 84% reduction on their bandwidth use by using Cloudflare’s global network, which stores and serves Bidu’s content from the local caches. In addition, Bidu’s website performance has improved dramatically as the result of serving content to customers from Cloudflare’s proximally located Latin American data centers and through Cloudflare’s support of faster, more secure HTTP/2. These performance improvements have resulted in Bidu’s time to first byte (with more stability pulling from the cache) dropping from 8s to an average of 1s, and full page load times dropping from 13 seconds to an average of only 2.3s. Menegasso credits Bidu’s 30% more leads YoY directly to the performance benefits from Cloudflare.

30%

MORE LEADS YEAR-OVER-YEAR

Additionally, Cloudflare’s WAF (Web Application Firewall) and extensive IP reputation filtering help Bidu identify and block malicious traffic to their site, keeping it more secure and reliable for their users.

Menegasso concluded, “With Cloudflare’s performance and security improvements, our customers are happier, and our business is better off!”