In the competitive world of e-commerce one thing is certain: Speed matters. Study after study continues to prove that a faster site leads to increased conversion rates, drives high checkout values and improves customer satisfaction. But delivering a fast web experience is difficult, and requires both an in-depth knowledge of web design and secondary “edge” infrastructure that ensures your site is as close to your customers as possible. For e-commerce sites, delivering a high performance experience can be especially difficult—with multiple platform and third-party application dependencies driving the complexity to 11.
Stepping into this void is a little known, and somewhat secretive “Speed as a Service” company called Edgemesh. Founded in 2016, Edgemesh provides a turnkey acceleration service that powers hundreds of online retailers that deliver some of the fastest online experiences on the web. In this Martech exclusive, we dive deep into what Edgemesh is, how it works and what kind of performance increase customers see with the acceleration platform.
What is Edgemesh?
Edgemesh was founded by three former high frequency trading partners who left building fast algorithms for Wall Street and turned to building faster website acceleration software in 2016. Their first product, Edgemesh Client, was released in 2017 and helps websites load faster by enhancing the browser with intelligent “client-side” caching. Edgemesh’s tagline of “a single line of code for a faster page load” encapsulates its ease of implementation (just add one line of JavaScript). This helps customers achieve 20-40% faster loading experiences with zero configuration. A hallmark of the company’s design is minimal customer configuration—and an adaptive system that tunes to your website.
In 2021, Edgemesh released its Edgemesh Server product—a full service edge acceleration platform that transparently delivers sites 30-70% faster still. Edgemesh Server, which operates across two content delivery networks (Cloudflare and Fastly), is a full service performance platform. According to Edgemesh, Server takes any existing website and seamlessly migrates it to the network edge while adding a number of performance-tuning enhancements. More on that below.
Edgemesh Client
The Edgemesh Client is an in-browser, or client-side, acceleration solution. Customers add Edgemesh Client via a one-click integration or by adding a single line of code to their existing site. Plugins are currently available for WordPress, Shopify and Cloudflare. The installation process is straightforward and takes about 5 minutes.
From there, the Edgemesh client adds two features: real-user monitoring (to show the site performance based on real customer experiences) and client-side caching. Edgemesh adds intelligent client-side caching via the Service Worker framework—a model originally designed to allow websites to function offline. This helps increase the amount of content the browser can hold locally, reducing the customer’s requests to the server itself. This alone provides a material speed-up, but the magic comes from its “pre-cache” logic.
Based on real user interactions and performance metrics, Edgemesh intelligently expands the browser cache to ensure more assets are pre-loaded for users—essentially guessing where the customer will go next and trying to stay one step ahead. The performance impact can be seen in the Edgemesh portal, with “Accelerated” users being those to whom the client-side cache served 10% or more of the page, and “Non-Accelerated” users being those who had little to no benefit from the client-side cache Edgemesh creates. Based on real customer case studies, the Edgemesh Client helps increase site speed by 20-40%.
The client also captures and powers a deep level of performance data. This data is gathered from real users on your website—what is called field data. There are multiple competitors in this space, including New Relic, App Dynamics and Datadog—but the Edgemesh portal is geared toward displaying performance data in pre-analyzed ways that we found intuitive.
For example, each performance metric has predefined levels of what is considered Fast, Average and Slow (color coded for simplicity)—allowing anyone to quickly identify areas that need improvement. Every performance metric available for analysis is captured and performance can be broken down by device, operating system, geography or even per page. In addition, the portal shows API-level timing data—allowing you to see the impact third-party scripts and applications have on your site’s performance, again with quick links to show slow apps only.
Edgemesh Server
Edgemesh Server is a full service acceleration platform. Unlike Edgemesh Client, the Server solution requires a one-on-one onboarding process. That said, the deployment is similarly easy—with customers simply updating a single DNS record in order to move to the Edgemesh platform.
Edgemesh Server sits atop two major content delivery networks—Cloudflare and Fastly. With Edgemesh Server, visitors hit an “edge served” version of your website, dramatically reducing the time taken to deliver the page. In addition, Edgemesh Server automatically and transparently enables a number of enterprise-grade performance tweaks, including:
- Optimizing images in next-generation formats including AVIF
- Compressing HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Upgrading the connection protocol to HTTP/3 when available
- Moving content onto origin (domain un-sharding)
- Adding intelligent preload directives and dynamic page preloading
- Adding the Edgemesh Client
For e-commerce companies, Edgemesh Server allows them to remain on their existing platform (e.g. Shopify) yet gain the performance benefits of a custom edge-served headless-style site. With the holiday season now behind us, Edgemesh shared some examples of performance gains their customer’s saw with Edgemesh Server:
Real World Results
Edgemesh has a number of case studies available on their website, but they provided some detailed examples of both the performance gains and the resulting impacts in conversion rate. Based on the supplied data we can confirm—speed matters!
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