Key Impacts
- Reduced page load time from 10 seconds to 2.5 seconds
- Increased site page views by 25%-30%
- Provided on demand scalability for traffic surges
- Grew advertising revenues
- Gained immediate cost savings by reduction in number of front-end servers and reduction in load on back-end servers
PCWorld.com is the Web's trusted resource for management-level buyers and users of technology products, offering quick access to reviews of current technology products, up-to-the-minute pricing information, news, and downloads. PC World approached Akamai to help accelerate its site performance—from a page load time of 10 seconds for the index/home page to a maximum of 4 seconds. With up to 5.3 unique visitors each month and new products and technologies constantly added, this performance improvement was deemed a critical factor in growing PCWorld.com's user base.
Initially, PC World turned to Akamai for its streaming solution. After experiencing initial success with Akamai Streaming, PC World chose to have its entire site served by Akamai, deploying EdgeSuite. The decision was based equally on cost and performance; 'pay as you go' pricing offered a compelling value compared to building out server capacity internally. Just months after deploying Akamai, PCWorld.com’s page load times had dropped to an average of just 2.5 seconds—a 75% improvement! Being able rely on this kind of performance has made PC World a more attractive destination for users and advertisers, as the performance increase has meant a four-fold increase in the number of ads served.
"Our download performance has improved 70-75%, and we have greatly improved the stability of our site. We expected a 50%
reduction in load time. What we saw was significantly higher..."
—Mary Zones, Chief Technology Officer, PC World
