1stDibs' image-rich site delivers fast, high-end user experiences for luxury shoppers

The Challenge

Imagine flagging an urgent need to purge content from cache and your CDN vendor tells you that it would take an hour. That's the situation 1stDibs faced with its legacy vendor, and it was unsustainable. From first click to purchase, speed drives success. 1stDibs needed rapid cache purges to ensure delivery of  fresh, accurate content – especially critical when customers might be  looking at a $6,000 antique bookcase or a $60,000 vintage necklace. Optimizing caching reduces page load times and ensures the best possible performance for every user, no matter where they are located. "Performance and user experience are incredibly important for e-commerce sites like 1stDibs," said Tim Whidden, VP of Engineering at 1stDibs. "When we couldn't get purging in seconds, we moved to Fastly."

The Solution

1stDibs gained the speed and performance it needed through Fastly features including lightning-fast purging and content delivery, easy image optimization, and edge compute. "I don't think you can run an e-commerce site with the amount of traffic we have without the services that Fastly provides. Caching at the edge, image optimizing, and the ability to run code at the edge to make a disparate set of services we have running behind the scenes be seamless across one domain. I don't know what we would do without Fastly," said Whidden.

Accelerating to "amazing" page-load times under 200ms

The need for rapid page-load times is well established in e-commerce: conversion rates drop quickly when users hit the 2-second mark. But page performance can also help determine whether a user sees your site at all. "You get judged by Google on how performant your pages are," Whidden said. Rapid page loads are crucial to SEO, and slow load times can negatively impact rankings. Since switching to Fastly, Whidden said, "our homepage shows up pretty much instantly for everyone, which is amazing." 

With Fastly, 75% of users are getting delivery in under 50 milliseconds, and 95% under 200ms. Compare that to average page-load time on the first page of Google search results—1.65 seconds—and 1stDibs is getting anywhere from 88% to 97% better results than competitors. 

Taking the manual labor out of image management

1stDibs specializes in design, fashion, and art, so high-quality, high-resolution images are everything. Most sellers share multiple photos to capture items from every angle and highlight every important detail, which adds up to millions of images on the site. "We encourage our sellers to upload the largest images they can, but then we need to display them in many different sizes," said Whidden. Fastly's Image Optimizer allows 1stDibs to size images on the fly, so its UX designers have the flexibility to change designs and use different image sizes without the hassle of preprocessing each one or the added cost of storing and retrieving them. "Image Optimization allows us to lazily size and format those images, from thumbnails to big blown-up images on the product detail pages," said Whidden. 

Performance and flexibly at the edge

When Fastly introduced Compute, 1stDibs seized the opportunity to customize at the edge. The company began to write edge logic in a way that could be subjected to unit and integration testing so they could be more confident about deploying code changes without disruptions. "Because Fastly’s solution uses WebAssembly, we benefited from a really performant, custom runtime at the edge running all of the traffic going to 1stDibs.com." Whidden said. The 1stDibs team also likes being able to write in TypeScript, one of several languages Compute officially supports.

Key takeaways

The bottom line for 1stDibs: thanks to Fastly content delivery and developer platform, 
"Users are getting a very, very fast experience when they come to our site," said Whidden. "Fastly helps us with efficiency and cost, but it’s even more than that. Fastly's product set is what we need at a fundamental level to run our website in a way that serves our users, and is efficient for our business."