Dolce & Gabbana fits sharper website system

25.03.2012
Italian fashion house Dolce&Gabbana has accelerated its website performance and improved the user experience for streamed events.

Using hosted cloud technology from Akamai Dolce&Gabbana has reduced average page load times to under 1.5 seconds and improved download speeds for both web and mobile web visitors.

Akamai's Dynamic Site Accelerator is being used to speed all versions of the firm's website. In addition to Dynamic Site Accelerator, Dolce&Gabbana is using Akamai Media Delivery to offer live and on demand streaming of its catwalks, including to mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and iTouch and also Android devices.

"Analysing the statistics related to the number of people accessing the web site, we noted that in some areas we were registering high abandonment rates. This was happening especially in the US, Japan and China," said a Dolce&Gabbana spokesperson.

Akamai analysed the different versions of the website to confirm the issues involved before being commissioned to deploy its Dynamic Site Accelerator system.

Before implementing Dynamic Site Accelerator, the site load time was over 8.5 seconds on average, but it has now decreased to less than 1.5 seconds. By decreasing page load times, Dolce&Gabbana has lowered site abandonment, which in turn has helped it increase e-commerce conversion rates, said the company.

Dynamic Site Accelerator has also allowed Dolce&Gabbana to reduce the load on its data centre by offloading over 87 percent of hits and traffic to Akamai edge servers, enabling it to confidently run high traffic marketing campaigns without special provisioning.

In addition, Dolce&Gabbana is using Akamai's Content Targeting system to customise content based on data about the visiting user's geographic location, connection speed, device type and other attributes.