Akamai EdgeWorkers and Uniform: Personalize Web Pages at Scale Without Flicker
To maintain an engaging relationship with your audience and increase conversions to your site, you need personalization. However, creating personalized experiences is technically challenging. Most personalization techniques involve dynamic rendering and an origin server that can slow performance and impact scalability.
Many traditional digital experience platforms (DXPs) and CMS solutions handle personalization by disabling CDN caching to keep personalization working, which leads to performance and scale issues.
Client-side personalization solutions often fight with modern JavaScript frameworks that leverage virtual Document Object Model (DOM) and require blocking calls or cause the dreaded flicker. The good news: Recent advancements of edge computing technology allow a no-compromise solution.
The benefits of edge computing for digital marketing teams
Akamai EdgeWorkers offers a powerful and familiar tech to developers — a JavaScript-based execution environment that provides the ability to intercept the request/response and alter it automatically, without the need of a traditional web server.
This is exactly the approach that Uniform is taking by enabling both personalization and A/B testing without flicker while maintaining stellar, static-like performance and automatic global scaling out of the box. By infusing additional context from the request using Akamai geo detection and device detection at the edge (EdgeScape), you are able to target content to the right person at the right time.
The best part: This works on your own Akamai account. Simply deploy EdgeWorkers with Uniform SDK, connect it with your Uniform account, and have it sit in front of any website that is powered by Uniform.
A fully compatible, unique approach
This unique approach is fully compatible with any modern front-end framework technology. It allows you to reuse content from any headless or legacy CMS, commerce product catalog, or any content API, giving you the power of choice and compatibility with your existing marketing technology stack. For example, if you have a customer data platform (CDP) capability, you can bring audiences, traits, and profiles into the mix and personalize based on those visitor attributes, as well.
In addition, this edge-based approach is fully compatible with modern single-page applications and JavaScript frameworks that use virtual DOM, so your front-end code doesn’t have to fight with the personalization and A/B testing tools. This approach is capable of serving highly dynamic pages in less than 100 milliseconds globally.
How does it work?
The flowchart in Figure 1 illustrates how this approach works. In the simplest terms, the browser request gets processed by Akamai CDN and routed via the EdgeWorkers layer. This is where the static page is processed by Uniform SDK and gets transformed into a personalized page based on visitor context. The personalized page then gets returned to the visitor’s browser.
Fig. 1: Akamai EdgeWorkers workflow
What is Uniform?
Built for marketers and merchandisers, Uniform unleashes the potential of teams and technology, integrating content and data systems with optimization and personalization tools to centralize experience creation inside a visual workspace (Figure 2).
Fig. 2: Uniform architecture
Edge-side personalization: Enterprise customer successes
Uniform is a pioneer of edge-side personalization, and their solution has been working for some of the most demanding customers worldwide for more than three years.
Examples of customers’ successes include:
- A major travel and hospitality brand improved time to first byte of a personalized page by 5x across five brand sites, and improved time to interactive by 2.8x.
- A flagship travel destination website, achieved three-second time to interactive and reduced the number of origin CMS servers to two.
- A vitamins and supplements digital commerce company struggled with performance, scalability, reliability, and other nonfunctional requirements with their DXP for years. Then their internal team implemented Uniform in a record time of two months without disruption to the business users. With Uniform, they improved their:
- Infrastructure: content delivery infrastructure reduced by 80%
- Stability: critical site alerts reduced from 2 or 3 a week to zero
- Performance: Core Web Vitals showed a reduction in slow pages from 2,000 to zero
Summary
Deploying EdgeWorkers and Uniform helps you solve your digital marketing team's needs by allowing them to run personalization and A/B testing without compromising Core Web Vitals, without flicker. Furthermore, they can eliminate the need to run traditional single origin servers that render personalized pages for every visitor.
By offloading 100% of dynamic personalized content to the edge nodes, you are not only able to serve the content from the closed point of presence to your visitors; you can also save costs on your server infrastructure, since it doesn’t have to serve as much payload. This approach works extremely well for marketers, developers, and IT teams alike.
Learn more
Want to learn more? You can read through all of Uniform’s technical details or reach out to schedule a live demo.
