www.davidsbridal.com

solutions:

• Dynamic Site Accelerator

DOWNLOAD DAVID'S BRIDAL CASE STUDY

• Reduced application servers by 40%
• Decreased Web server utilization by 90%
• Reduced bandwidth requirements by 98%
• Lowered CPU utilization by 70%
• Scales on demand to handle traffic spikes
• Deferred additional infrastructure build-out costs
• Positioned for future growth

For more than 50 years, David's Bridal has served more brides-to-be than any other bridal retailer in the United States. With the largest selection of bridal gowns, bridal party, special occasion dresses and accessories available online and at over 330 stores, David's Bridal has established itself as the nation's most trusted and leading bridal authority. The largely dynamic site averages as many as 600,000 page views and 220,000 unique visitors per day during peak times. The online store not only gives shoppers the opportunity to shop anytime, anywhere they want, but also allows them to pre-shop on products prior to visiting the stores.

Upon seeing the level of required investment, it evaluated content delivery networks and chose the Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator solution. "No other solution provider offered the level of sophistication we needed. Akamai not only caches dynamic content on the edge, it makes it possible to apply different cache rules on a single page,"says Stan Payson, vice president of Interactive Technology for David's Bridal.

With Akamai serving the company's dynamic content from thousands of geographically distributed servers, site performance has improved significantly. Now that site visitors can tap into all the new site features – including enhanced search and a rapidly expanding online product assortment – David's Bridals is confident that the improvement has contributed to higher online sales. Plus, it can now focus on its core business and enhancing its site instead of worrying about site performance. "Not only did we increase site performance, we can now absorb unplanned and unanticipated traffic spikes without expanding our infrastructure. It's as if we gained an elastic architecture,"explains Payson.