Square Yards Elevated Digital Experiences

Square Yards, India’s largest integrated real estate and mortgage platform, serves millions of monthly users across India. With an ecosystem spanning property transactions, home loans, rentals, and more, performance, security, and consistency are essential. But rising bot traffic, escalating search complexity, and growing infrastructure strain made it increasingly difficult to ensure fast, reliable digital experiences and business growth. The company partnered with Akamai to protect its web and API platforms, optimize content delivery, and gain the visibility needed to attract new users and maintain smooth, high-quality experiences at scale.

Valued at nearly US$1 billion, Square Yards boasts a competitive edge in its full-stack ecosystem. “We combine deep real estate domain expertise with strong in-house technology capabilities to deliver a seamless experience to customers, channel partners, and developers,” said Deepak Kushwaha, Head of Engineering at Square Yards.

But even with this strong foundation, new market dynamics began to put pressure on the platform. Google algorithm shifts and AI-generated content intensified SEO competition, while sophisticated bots rotated IP addresses, abused APIs, scraped listings, triggered lead forms, and inflated traffic.

“Automated attacks are no longer limited to simple scraping,” explained Kushwaha. “We now see high-intent bots mimicking user behavior at a scale that directly impacts our customer experience.”

Scraping tools captured pricing and inventory data from 10,000+ listings daily. Fake form submissions distorted marketing metrics and wasted the sales team’s time. And rising bot traffic drove up cloud costs while obscuring the real performance picture.

Transparency issues with its prior CDN provider made matters worse. “For us, visibility is critical to optimizing conversion funnels. But we struggled to see which traffic was genuine, how caching decisions were being made, or why performance dropped,” Kushwaha said.

The team evaluated Google Cloud CDN but found operational complexity a deal-breaker. “Rule setup was extraordinarily complex. Even basic bot protections required deep knowledge of Google’s policy language,” Kushwaha explained.

The image pipeline was another challenge. Real estate relies on high-quality visuals, and a single listing may include 20–50 images. With Google, maintaining fast load times would require stitching together multiple Google Cloud offerings and third-party optimization tools.

“Ensuring fast load times on 3G connections in tier-3 cities while managing a fragmented image pipeline would be a nightmare,” he noted.

Square Yards needed a platform that was powerful, transparent, and easy to operate at scale. Akamai delivered the balance of enterprise-grade performance and simplicity the engineering team was looking for.

According to Kushwaha, the deciding factors included a single interface for all configurations along with intuitive rule management, proven performance at global scale, and superior bot mitigation and web application firewall (WAF). The company was also swayed by deep observability with real-time logs and analytics, fast onboarding, and strong customer support.

To address its performance and security concerns, Square Yards implemented the following solutions:

• App & API Protector: Quickly identifies vulnerabilities and mitigates threats across web and API estates
• Cloud Wrapper: Efficiently caches content and reduces traffic to origin
• Edge DNS: Protects on-prem, cloud, and hybrid DNS while ensuring high availability and performance
• Image & Video Manager: Intelligently optimizes images and videos for every user on any device
• TrafficPeak: Provides real-time dashboards for monitoring performance, security, and user experience

After a smooth transition to Akamai, Square Yards saw dramatic improvements in stability, performance, and user experience. “Akamai actually understands our business context and helps optimize for real estate–specific patterns,” Kushwaha added.

Cloud Wrapper now serves 75%–80% of requests directly at the edge, reducing origin load and stabilizing infrastructure during traffic spikes and peak search hours. Largest Contentful Paint improved by 40%–45%, and first-byte times dropped nearly 40%. Key user journeys, like property search and lead intake, now load 20%–35% faster. 

Akamai Image & Video Manager automatically delivers optimized formats and device-specific sizes, cutting image bandwidth by 65%. Bad URLs dropped from 6,000 to fewer than 50, and major campaigns now run without performance concerns.

“Akamai has enabled us to provide a fast, reliable, and consistently high-quality experience across all devices and user segments — even during peak periods,” said Kushwaha.

These technical gains translated directly into business impact. Faster page loads and more stable journeys reduced bounce rates and improved paid campaign conversions, with cost per lead dropping 23%.

Akamai’s bot mitigation cleaned up analytics and protected competitive data. “Akamai blocks millions of scraping requests each month,” noted Kushwaha.

Real-time dashboards and logs now give Square Yards precise visibility into cache hit ratios, WAF activity, traffic anomalies, and bot patterns. “Now we can make faster, more informed decisions,” he added.

With Akamai, Square Yards consolidated security and content delivery management under one unified, transparent platform. This eliminated the operational overhead of juggling multiple tools and reduced troubleshooting time from hours to minutes. Responsive local SOC support further accelerated issue resolution and reduced team stress.

“Akamai has given us greater control and peace of mind, and significantly improved our day-to-day operations. As we continue pursuing our expansion plans, having Akamai as a stable foundation means we can innovate without worrying about our security or delivery infrastructure,” concluded Kushwaha.