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wikiHow is a trusted knowledge resource for over 150 million monthly visitors spanning 230 countries. Here’s how Fastly’s edge cloud network helps them meet growing user expectations by providing the most up-to-date articles in real time.
www.wikihow.com
Industry: Media
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Customer since: August 2012
Favorite features
Content delivery
DDoS mitigation
Real-time logging
Shielding
Answers for 150 million+
Over 150 million monthly visitors — spanning 230 countries — rely on wikiHow for learning new skills, whether it’s an emergency (at least four babies have been born with the help of a wikiHow article) or how to make a chocolate souffle, making it even more critical that they offer consistent, secure, and reliable experiences for their readers. As a wiki, their content is constantly changing, much more so than the average online destination — articles are being edited in real time, and wikiHow needs to reflect the most-up-to-date content without incurring a performance lag. They turned to Fastly’s edge cloud network to help them offer readers critical answers in real time, and for a CDN that enables them to cache and update constantly changing wiki articles.
“Performance is of utmost importance to us — our users expect pages to load really quickly. Fastly’s premium and dependable edge cloud network gives us that competitive edge.”
Elizabeth Douglas
CEO
Performance when (and where) it matters most
Not only do readers expect the most up-to-date information, but they expect pages to load instantly — if they don’t find their much-needed info quickly, they’ll go elsewhere. With Fastly, the wikiHow team can provide their community with the latest informative articles in real time, further strengthening their position as a reliable and dependable resource. Using Fastly’s shielding feature, which lets them designate a single point of presence (POP) as a shield for their origins, wikiHow can ensure content is readily accessible for their users. If an article isn’t available at a certain POP, requests will go to the shield POP as opposed to returning to wikiHow’s origins, which can be costly and cause performance to suffer.
“By ensuring fast page loads and the most-up-to-date articles, Fastly helps our users feel confident completing whatever tasks they’re trying to accomplish. Unlike other solutions, Fastly’s CDN gives us the flexibility to always have our articles up to date and available.”
Elizabeth Douglas
CEO
Readers turn to their mobile devices when seeking answers on the fly, but they don’t want to wait: 53% of mobile users will abandon a site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. With more than half of wikiHow’s readers accessing articles via mobile devices, it’s even more critical that they serve relevant answers in real time. According to Douglas, “Fastly empowers wikiHow to offer mobile readers the same fast and reliable experiences they’ve come to expect with desktop.”
Real-time insights
wikiHow relies on Fastly’s real-time logging to give them in-depth insight into their traffic, such as actions users take on a page, enabling them to dig into user behavior and fine-tune performance. Because Fastly enables them to stream logs to any endpoint of their choosing, wikiHow can customize their monitoring without having to build their own infrastructure.
About wikiHow
wikiHow is an online wiki-style community consisting of an extensive database of how-to guides. Founded in 2005 by internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, the website aims to create the world’s most helpful how-to instructions to enable everyone in the world to learn how to do anything. wikiHow’s mission is to teach everyone in the world how to do anything, with step-by-step articles teach people on anything from boiling an egg to learning a new skill, learning about fitness or fixing their iPhones. Available in 17 languages (with more in the works), they’ve been classified as a basic free service in 42 countries, and Comscore ranks wikiHow in the top 150 most-visited publishers in the world.
About Fastly
Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud network to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand. Founded in 2011, Fastly powers online destinations including Airbnb, GitHub, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Ticketmaster. Learn more at Fastly.com and follow us on Twitter @fastly.
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