How does onboarding work at Fasterize? How long does the implementation take? Who should be involved? In this article, we explain everything you need to know about the steps of deploying our SaaS solution, from the audit to the actual acceleration of your site speed . Follow the guide!
The 5 steps of deploying Fasterize
- The audit
A dedicated Customer Success Engineer (CSE) first analyzes your site to prepare an audit and webperf optimization recommendations . He then organizes a meeting to validate the technical constraints with you and learn in detail about your environment, and define a schedule. This allows us to best prepare the ground and adapt our optimizations to your context.
For this kick-off , infrastructure, technical and business managers are warmly invited!
- Discovery mode
After learning about the technical environment, Fasterize is “plugged” into your site in Discovery mode . That is, the platform retrieves traffic from the original server to analyze it, but initially without applying any optimizations. In practice, when the server sends us a response, we send exactly the same one to the browsers.
Prerequisites for this step:
- your DNS will be changed so that your domain name points to Fasterize;
- Your TLS certificate must be installed on Fasterize.
It can be carried out on a pre-production environment.
For this step, your dedicated CSE will call on your infrastructure and technical teams.
- Setting the configuration
Using the information collected during phases 1 and 2, the CSE performs personalized optimizations according to the environment. If necessary, the CDN can also be configured.
During this setup phase , the CSE calls on the technical and business teams.
- Functional testing
The CSE validates the parameters defined on the platform. It carries out a complete functional acceptance test first, and then passes the baton to you to carry out the tests on your side.
Using our recipe guide , our Chrome and Firefox extensions and your CSE, your business teams will have to test the optimizations activated on your production environment to validate them.
This step is crucial, because it is only once we have your validation that we activate Fasterize for all your users.
We of course remain available to provide step-by-step support and ensure that the solution is operated under the best possible conditions.
- Acceleration, aka : Boost
Last step, and not least: optimizations are activated for all or part of the traffic. You are now officially fasterized !
How long should I expect to take to deploy Fasterize?
These 5 steps usually take place over a period of 4 to 6 weeks . This is the time required to test the platform settings and adapt them as best as possible.
Obviously, it is not a question of our customers dedicating themselves full-time to this subject (3 to 4 days/man in total are generally necessary). It is our dedicated CSEs who take care of the configuration and monitoring, and who make adjustments until everything is ready to be activated, working hand in hand with your teams and your service providers if necessary.
Organization and resources point
Our role is to relieve our clients’ teams as much as possible , with all the help needed at the start for a successful deployment.
As with any project, we need a main contact who acts as project manager.
Depending on the organization, this resource may be on the IT, infrastructure, business side, etc. We may be required to occasionally exchange with stakeholders who have visibility on the business and business issues, but also the application and hardware, content, technical operation of the site, etc. Web performance is everyone’s business !
Again, the goal is not to mobilize all these resources continuously, but to be able to request them in a timely manner to provide our customers with the best possible service. For example: to know the frequency of product page updates to be able to manage the cache, or whether the site uses an A/B test or a tag manager and how they work to optimize the settings accordingly.
Actions to be taken to implement Fasterize
Now you may be wondering what actions we need to take to deploy Fasterize, and what we might need. Here are some examples:
- Your TLS certificate which will be installed on the platform as we saw above – to be sent to us at each renewal, or with the possibility of setting up Let’s Encrypt so that we ensure this renewal on our side);
- Verifying that your servers, security and load balancing equipment are aware of the correct IP address of the Internet user (we use the X-Forwarded-For header , like all CDNs on the market);
- Mapping dynamic areas of the site for SmartCache (personal or product data, A/B server testing, etc.);
- Possible HTML adjustments based on dynamic area mapping (like adding a container with a CSS class around dynamic content);
- Changing DNS records ;
- Authorization (whitelisting) of Fasterize IPs on your security equipment;
- A functional recipe – for which we support you;
- Joy, good humor and enthusiasm (we have plenty of that!).
To get the most out of the platform, we may also ask you for marginal modifications. This may consist of adding a generic class in the HTML, for example… These are generally simple modifications to implement, recommended by our webperf experts.
To learn more about Fasterize’s support throughout the deployment phase,
we invite you to discover the wonderful story we wrote with Bureau Vallée!