Optimizely Announces Performance Edge, Enabling the Industry’s Fastest Web Experiments

SAN FRANCISCO, September 12, 2019 — Optimizely, the world's leader in digital experience optimization, today launched Performance Edge, a new product that enables high-performing experimentation teams to easily scale their programs and run more experiments without compromising customer experience. Performance Edge enables visual-editor based website experiments to run faster — on average in less than 50 milliseconds, or faster than the blink of an eye — by moving decision logic from the browser to the CDN.

More than 40 percent of today’s business decision makers view digital experimentation as the most important driver of growth in the next three years — over AI, automation, and mobile. Further, companies that run more than 200 experiments annually can drive a reported 14 percent or greater revenue lift. However, running a high volume of experiments can impact site performance as each experiment adds workload to the browser. This challenge is compounded by the importance of web page performance on customer experience: 95 percent of customers will leave a website due to a frustrating digital experience, and almost half of consumers (44%) say fast site load time is among the top three most critical aspects of their digital experience.

Performance Edge provides a solution to this problem by moving key experimentation execution from the browser to the edge. With a one-time implementation of Performance Edge, teams benefit from the simplicity of Optimizely’s industry-leading visual editor coupled with an even faster performance profile, unleashing the potential for experimentation programs to scale and drive business growth and customer advocacy.

"Keeping sites and apps loading lightning-fast while running more and more experiments is critical for digital companies looking to compete on experience. Over the years we’ve seen companies, such as IBM and StubHub, expand their experimentation programs by growing the number of team members and the number of experiments run on a daily basis. As these companies scale, they need an experience optimization platform that prioritizes performance, which is why we've built the world's first Experiment Delivery Network,” said Claire Vo, senior vice president of Product, Optimizely. “We're excited to announce the first product offering that takes advantage of it — Optimizely Performance Edge."

Optimizely’s unique Experiment Delivery Network (EDN) technology is the foundation for Performance Edge and is powered by Cloudflare Workers, which runs code at the edge of Cloudflare’s global network with extremely low latency, allowing experiments to be run in the browser much faster even as companies scale to hundreds of experiments.

“We built Cloudflare Workers to give developers the ability to deploy and execute code directly at the edge of Cloudflare’s global network, which spans 194 cities in more than 90 countries,” said Rita Kozlov, product manager of Workers at Cloudflare. “Optimizely’s Performance Edge product builds upon our vision, and empowers their customers to bring the experience even closer to their end users.”

Performance Edge is compatible with a wide-range of CDNs and serverless worker technologies. It launches in early access today for select Optimizely Web capabilities and customers. Once released for general availability, Performance Edge will be available globally as a paid add-on for Optimizely Web.