How Heels.com kicks up video performance

With as many as 22,000 unique visitors a day, Heels.com’s video-heavy pages often took up to 30 seconds to load—if visitors could access them at all.

To cater to its discriminating shoppers of women’s designer shoes, Heels presents online videos for each of its footwear selections. But the combination of steady traffic and all that video content had presented a major challenge to site performance, says CEO Eric McCoy.

But since the web-only global retailer deployed the Dynamic Site Accelerator application from Akamai Technologies Inc. earlier this fall, it has improved page-loading speed by as much as 400% and increased its control over content management without having to deploy additional web servers, the retailer says. The Dynamic Site Accelerator uses Akamai’s global content delivery network to cache web site content, then secure and accelerate the delivery of that content to appear on web pages.

“Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator helps even the playing field for us in a highly competitive business,” McCoy says. “Plus, Akamai offers us the same level of service as it offers the biggest brand names.”

McCoy adds: “We can improve control over changing content, offload our servers and gain the ability to add more video and rich content without degrading the visitor shopping experience. Since deploying Dynamic Site Accelerator, our site has handled a 78% year-over-year increase in traffic—without adding servers.”