Housing.com Strengthened UX and Security

Housing.com is one of India’s leading online real estate platforms, serving millions of users across India and beyond. Built around AI-driven personalization, high-quality listings, and a sleek user experience, the user-friendly, data-driven platform supports buyers, renters, and real estate professionals with equal ease. As user expectations grew and search became increasingly mobile-first and latency-sensitive, Housing.com faced a critical challenge: how to deliver personalized, secure, and fast search experiences at scale without sacrificing speed or SEO performance. To maintain its leadership in a competitive space, it turned to Akamai for proven solutions and expert guidance.

Housing.com was particularly vulnerable to scraping, bot traffic, and attacks on its API infrastructure. To fight back against malicious traffic, it implemented a WAF and bot mitigation layer with an Akamai competitor. But what was supposed to improve site security ended up hurting performance — and the bottom line.

“We saw a 15%–20% increase in latency across both our web and API traffic,” said Upendra Singh, Associate Director DevOps, Technology Team, Housing.com. “This negatively impacted our Core Web Vitals, driving down SEO rankings, and ultimately reducing organic traffic.”

The performance lag also introduced friction for internal teams. “It slowed our tech teams’ ability to deliver features quickly,” Singh continued.

Housing.com explored other vendors, but ultimately chose Akamai App & API Protector and Edge DNS. The decision came down to Akamai’s enterprise-grade flexibility, deep security expertise, and collaborative approach.

“Akamai didn’t just offer us a product — it offered a partnership,” said Sachin Agrawal, Senior Engineering Manager, Housing.com. “Its team was willing to co-engineer solutions, benchmark them with real data, and help us optimize every step of the way.”

The onboarding process was both comprehensive and seamless. Akamai worked side by side with Housing.com to benchmark real-world performance using Catchpoint and real user monitoring (RUM) data, run data-focused proofs of concept, and deliver a phased, customized rollout plan. “The PoCs gave us data-backed clarity, and the collaborative onboarding ensured a confident migration,” he continued.

A key turning point was comparing Akamai and other vendors’ performance across geographies in real time using Catchpoint. “That data made the value crystal clear,” said Agrawal.

Post migration, the results were immediate and measurable. Housing.com saw a more than 10% improvement in time to first byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which directly enhanced user experience and engagement across the platform. 

For users in India, response times dropped by around 10%, delivering faster interaction cycles and a noticeably smoother search experience. Crucially, these performance gains didn’t come at the expense of search engine visibility. Even with a new WAF layer in place, crawl times from the U.S. remained consistent, helping to preserve SEO integrity and maintain rankings across key landing pages. In fact, Core Web Vitals including LCP and First Input Delay (FID) consistently improved, leading to ranking recoveries and visibility gains across both Indian and international markets.

“With Akamai, we gained flexible rule configurations and AI-driven threat detection,” said Singh. “That allowed us to proactively defend our platform while keeping things fast.”

Today, Akamai handles more than 97% of traffic offload, dramatically reducing origin load, boosting uptime, and ensuring resilience during traffic surges.

One of the standout advantages of partnering with Akamai has been access to its local Security Operations Command Center (SOCC) and support team, a resource Housing.com calls “invaluable.”

“Akamai’s local team truly understands our business context, industry-specific challenges, and the competitive landscape we operate in,” said Agrawal. “That makes all the difference when time is critical.”

This regional support has helped Housing.com deploy several key solutions. For example, Akamai implemented 5xx shields to improve uptime. The team also helped integrate EdgeWorkers for advanced caching, improving delivery speed and scalability, and configured TrafficPeak to enable real-time monitoring.

“Akamai’s hands-on support and deep regional knowledge have made us more resilient and responsive,” explained Agrawal.

The move to Akamai didn’t just improve user experience. It changed how Housing.com’s teams work, from tech to marketing.

Developers now spend far less time tuning security or troubleshooting performance issues. “Akamai gives our teams better visibility, observability, and control. This freed our developers to focus on building features and innovating,” noted Agrawal.

The marketing team has also seen a direct benefit. “Landing pages load faster and SEO scores are up. That means better campaign results and higher conversion,” said Agrawal.

Looking ahead, Housing.com is trying to expand its Akamai partnership by exploring an initiative: migrating from a custom-built image optimization tool to Akamai Image & Video Manager.

“Currently, we use our own solution for cropping, resizing, format conversion, and watermarking. Akamai is helping us create a replacement that’s scalable, cost-effective, and high performing. Plus, it requires no engineering or code changes. It’s another reflection of the deep collaboration between our two teams,” Agrawal concluded.

Founded in 2012 and acquired by REA India (formerly known as Elara Technologies Pte. Ltd.) in 2017, Housing.com stands as India's No. 1 Real Estate App, catering to homeowners, home seekers, landlords, developers, and real estate brokers. Housing.com provides comprehensive listings for a wide range of properties, including new homes, resale homes, rentals, plots, commercial spaces, and co-living accommodations across India. Find out more at housing.com/about.