CASE STUDY
Dunelm , one of the UK ’ s leading retailers , has collaborated with Fastly , the software development company , to support a major Digital Transformation initiative and secure its online presence . the way Dunelm was able to do business online . Monolithic architecture with single points of failure that was difficult to scale severely limited the business ’ flexibility online and made its operations vulnerable to cyber threats .
Dunelm . com switched to Fastly to increase speed for its shoppers across web and mobile storefronts , enhance security , deliver site updates faster at scale and augment an Infrastructure-as-Code strategy . The results : an average of 978 % improvement in page load speed on its homepage , a 23 % increase in basket performance , a 200x increase in deployments and greater protection of customer data .
The first step in achieving this technological shift was to transform the mindset of the teams working at Dunelm . This cultural mindshift meant each team had their priorities altered as they were reoriented towards delivering strong outcomes for the business . It also prioritised a low-code approach , with modular blocks of code built to update across the platform and remove any duplicated code to remove redundancies .
How Fastly supported Dunelm to rebuild its website and prioritise the customer experience
Dunelm approached Fastly with the target of taking its business operations to the Edge . In practical terms , this meant prioritising a highly performant , API-first approach , with the target of 100 % Infrastructure-as- Code – and giving Fastly 18 months to build this .
Partnership successes
This approach was hugely valuable as the customer journey through the Dunelm website was prioritised and tested , while observability was placed at the heart of all infrastructure . Additionally , by giving individual teams increased self-serve capabilities , their autonomy and ability to experiment ( with guardrails in place ) was significantly expanded .
The organisation wanted this because legacy infrastructure has several issues that impacted
In concrete terms , this partnership resulted in a major streamlining of the way Dunelm ’ s teams worked . The
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