How does onboarding work at Fasterize? How long does the implementation take? Who needs to be involved? In this article, we explain everything you need to know about the steps involved in deploying our SaaS solution, from the audit to the actual acceleration of your site. Follow the guide!
The 5 steps to deploy Fasterize
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Audit
A dedicated Customer Success Engineer (CSE) first analyzes your site to prepare an audit and recommendations for web performance optimization. They then organize a meeting with you to validate the technical requirements and get to know your environment in detail, and define a schedule. This allows us to prepare the ground and adapt our optimizations to your context.
For this kick-off, the infrastructure, technical and business managers are warmly invited!
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Discovery mode
After analyzing the technical environment, Fasterize is "plugged" to your web site in Discovery mode. It means the platform retrieves the traffic from the original server to analyze it, but at first without applying optimizations. Concretely, when the server sends us a response, we send exactly the same to 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 performed on a pre-production environment.
For this step, your dedicated CSE will call upon your infrastructure and technical teams.
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Set-up
Using the information collected over phases 1 and 2, the CSE sets up custom optimizations for your specific environment. If necessary, the CDN can also be set-up.
During this setup phase, the CSE calls on the technical and business teams.
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Functionnal tests
The CSE validates the settings defined on the platform. The CSE performs a full functional tests first, and then hands over to you to perform the tests on your side.
Using our fonctionnal tests guide, our Chrome and Firefox extensions and with the help of your CSE, your business teams will have to test the optimizations activated on your production environment to validate them.
This step is essential, because we activate Fasterize for all your users only once we have your validation.
We remain of course available for a step by step support, and ensure that the solution is operated in the best conditions.
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Boost
Last but not least, the optimizations are activated for all or part of the traffic. You are now officially fasterized!
How long will it take to deploy Fasterize?
These 5 steps generally take place over a period of 4 to 6 weeks. This is the time required to test the platform's settings and adapt them as best as possible.
Obviously, none of our customers is dedicated full time to this subject, as only 3 to 4 days in all are generally necessary. Our dedicated CSEs will take care of the set-up and monitoring, and will make adjustments until everything is ready to be activated, working hand in hand with your teams and service providers if necessary.
Organisation and resources
Our role is to take the burden off our customers' teams, with all the necessary start-up support for a successful deployment.
As for any project, we need a main contact person who assumes the role of project manager.
Depending on the organization, this resource may be on the IT side, the infrastructure side, the business side, etc. We may need to have occasional discussions with the stakeholders who have a view of the business and the business issues, but also the application and hardware, the content, the technical functioning of the site, etc. Web performance is everyone's business!
Once again, the goal is not to mobilize all these resources continuously, but to be able to call on them at the right time to provide our customers with the best possible service. For example: to know the frequency of product page updates in order to manage the cache, or if the site uses an A/B test or a tag manager and how they work in order to optimize the settings accordingly.
Actions to plan to implement Fasterize
By now, you may be wondering what actions we need to take to deploy Fasterize, and what we may need. Here are some examples:
- Your TLS certificate which will be installed on the platform as we have seen 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);
- The verification of the fact that your servers, security and load balancing equipment know the correct IP address of the Internet user (we use the X-Forwarded-For header, like all CDNs on the market);
- Mapping of dynamic areas of the site for SmartCache (personal or product data, A/B server test...);
- Possible HTML adjustments according to the mapping of the dynamic zones (such as adding a container with a CSS class around a dynamic content);
- Modification of DNS records;
- Authorization (whitelisting) of Fasterize IPs on your security equipment;
- Functional tests - for which we accompany you;
- Joy, good humor and enthusiasm (we have it in spades!).
To get the most out of the platform, we may also ask you to make some marginal changes. This can consist in adding a generic class in the HTML, for example... These are generally simple modifications to implement, recommended by our web performance experts.
To learn more about Fasterize's support throughout the deployment phase,
we invite you to discover the beautiful story we wrote with But!
