Edgemesh Case Study: UMZU

The challenge

A High Volume of Traffic and Slow Site Speed

Darren Crawford, Cofounder and COO at UMZU, was investing heavily in paid advertising to drive more traffic to the company’s website in 2019. And that tactic was working.

But between thousands of visitors and all the tracking scripts required to run the business, Darren saw the Shopify site get progressively slower. And having been involved in e-commerce since 1997, he understood the negative impact of slow speed on conversions.

He needed to figure out a way to make the site faster, so that UMZU could continue to scale. He looked into going headless, but at UMZU’s size ($5 million in revenue), rebuilding everything was too much of a risk.

“Site speed was important, and we could see it. When it slowed down, the conversion rates would drop, and that's money.”

The solution

Increasing Speed Without Rebuilding

That’s why, when Darren discovered Edgemesh, he was intrigued by the ease of onboarding. Getting Edgemesh up and running was as simple as adding a line of code. He wouldn’t have to rewrite his entire website and build a whole development team to manage it.

It only took a few minutes for Edgemesh’s pre-cache technology to start speeding up the site.

Beyond performance, Darren feels completely supported by the members of the Edgemesh team, who are always available to answer questions or help solve problems.

After seeing how well and how quickly Edgemesh worked, headless was off the table for Darren.

“Just being able to deploy without any thinking and knowing that Edgemesh is out there speeding things up made the decision pretty simple.”

First contentful paint time, a measure of how quickly a complete page is delivered to a user, improved significantly.

Real time Pagespeed Insights

The Results

Scaling from $5 million to $20 million

Since using Edgemesh in 2019, UMZU has scaled from $5 million to $20 million in revenue. Not even COVID slowed that growth down — in fact, with more people thinking about their health, business accelerated.

Darren attributes a good portion of that success to Edgemesh, which has allowed the site to keep up with the increase in traffic. The server response time is now 2.3 times faster. The time to first byte is 2.1 times faster. And the first paint time is 65% faster.

Without these speed increases, Darren knows UMZU would have felt more growing pains. And he feels that Edgemesh can continue to grow alongside the company for the foreseeable future.

“I don't think we would have scaled as far as we have without Edgemesh. And I think we would've seen the pain of scaling two years ago, because of the amount of traffic.”