Websites get faster when moving to Fastly

Fastly reduces time to first byte (TTFB) by 20% (300 ms) for websites migrating from Cloudflare, resulting in 25% faster TTFB.**

Speed matters… and we’re called Fastly for a reason. The performance expectation of a CDN has changed radically over the past decade. Your business has seconds to capture and retain attention from the user and laggy websites or apps simply won’t cut it (and haven’t for quite some time now). When focusing on performance, even the smallest changes can yield a meaningful performance boost. In fact, as seen in this post and the chart below, “a 5% improvement in CDN offload performance can mean a 50% load reduction at origin”.

Below, we’ll dive into how Fastly is uniquely positioned to bring you incredible results (like seen above) and how we beat the competition.

Why move to Fastly?

Let’s talk performance, we’re built for efficiency with high-capacity POPs that keep more in cache for faster TTFB, lower latency, and lower costs. We located our POPs near major cloud providers and peered with Internet exchange points around the world, enabling us to have POPs (and cached content) as close to end users as possible, almost always traveling over the fastest pipes available.

Our powerful POP architecture allows us to hold more in cache and for longer which means we can deliver faster time to first byte than our competitors. Fastly has on average a 32% faster TTFB than other CDNs and 25% (1.25x) faster TTFB when moving from Cloudflare CDN to Fastly. Using the same methodology, we found that websites moving from Fastly to Cloudflare had a median of 14% slower TTFB. Our efficiency also means superior resiliency. Fastly’s resilient architecture principles prevent outages, mitigate severity, and deliver on our availability promises without compromising performance.

But it’s not just about performance (although that’s very important!) Fastly provides more custom configuration, superior customer support, improved security with SmartParse, and no billing surprises. Along with the performance benefits you can also reduce your operating costs, including capital expenditures. In Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ (TEI), commissioned by Fastly and conducted by Forrester Consulting, Fastly customers saw an ROI of 189% (based on a composite organization). One of the ways we get you to numbers like that is by saving big on egress in ways that the competition just can’t match.

Fastly’s Edge Cloud Platform powers delivery, security, compute, and observability. Allowing you to deliver faster, safer, and more engaging digital experiences. All of our product offerings have been built on top of this single, programmable platform, therefore they all benefit from the same granular control, real-time visibility, and immediate scalability. Our platform empowers DevOps and Operations teams to deliver instant, personalized, and secure end-user experiences. Fastly’s platform eliminates the tradeoffs between fast, safe, and engaging. It does so by delivering content and applications closer to your users, really fast, securing them with higher accuracy, and giving flexibility to developers. Our software-defined network has enabled Fastly to build a custom purging system for any cached content, allowing us to invalidate stale content in milliseconds. This means we can deliver dynamic content (e.g. rapidly changing inventory, sales prices, sports scores, etc.) much faster and more reliably than our competitors while reducing trips to origin for cost savings.

It’s time to rethink your CDN

Measuring CDNs against one another is hard. There are a lot of valid questions like what metric to use, what dataset to use, and what sites to look at, but the numbers speak for themselves. We’ve focused our efforts on placing fewer, more powerful POPs at strategic locations around the world. Fastly’s high-density POPs enable us to serve more from cache, including static and event-driven content. When you add in our superior request collapsing, you start to understand how Fastly can help you achieve better rates of offload.

There are many reasons why a top-tier CDN will always outperform a legacy CDN (or even a pretty good CDN). If you want to learn more about how we do it – let’s talk!

**Based on the median percentage difference in 75th percentile TTFB sourced from the Chrome UX Report (Big Query), from the month before Cloudflare’s last observed month to the month after Fastly’s first observed month, for the 99 origins that migrated from Cloudflare to Fastly between 2022-05 and 2024-05. For this research, an origin migrated from Cloudflare to Fastly if CDN Detection Method #3 on the origin’s hostname found only Cloudflare and Fastly, at least 2 observed months of each, with Cloudflare before Fastly, 0 months in between Cloudflare’s last observed month and Fastly’s first observed month, and no more than 1 month of overlap between Cloudflare and Fastly detections across all tests in the HTTP Archive where the origin rank is less than or equal to 100,000 and dated between 2022-04 and 2024-06. Learn more about our methodology.