CASE STUDY
French newspaper Libération boosts dynamic serving
with CDNetworks
At a Glance
Key Results
Company|Libération
++ A mobile website that loads four times faster Founded|1941
++ A 165% increase in mobile traffic
++ A higher Google ranking for the mobile
Headquarters|France
website
++ Capacity to handle spikes in traffic, such as a
Industry|Media
25-fold increase during the 2015 Paris attacks
CDN Services
|
Content Acceleration
++ A website that can be read on the Paris subway
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“Thanks to the performance boost delivered by CDNetworks’ dynamic serving technology, our website can be
viewed on the Paris subway – and our mobile website loads four times faster.” Xavier Grangier, Head of Digital Technology at Libération
Libération is a major French daily newspaper. Its website, www.liberation.fr, gets 20 million visits and 60–80
million page views each month. In 2013, the website became the first among French newspapers to use
responsive design technology, meaning its page layout changes depending on whether the website is viewed
from a computer or mobile device.
But this technology caused problems with slow page loads, especially on smartphones since the pages for
computers first had to be uploaded in full and then adjusted to the size of the smartphone screen. And viewing
websites from mobile devices was already a tedious process in places without 3G network coverage. That had an
impact on Libération’s SEO as well, since page load times are a factor in search engine rankings.
The Challenge
Libération’s digital technology team, headed by Xavier Grangier, decided to switch from responsive design to
dynamic serving – a new technology that enables companies to have two websites with the same URL address:
one for use on computers and one for use on mobile devices. The team looked into the different dynamic serving
solutions available, and found that while most companies offered it for a fee, CDNetworks – which had been
providing Libération with CDN services since 2008 – offered to provide it with no extra charge. The only change
needed was a new configuration. What’s more, Libération was already a satisfied CDNetworks customer: 98% of its
website content is managed using CDNetworks’ system and only the remaining 2% is hosted on the newspaper’s
own servers.
The new dynamic serving websites were launched in September 2015, with instant results: the website can now
be viewed on the Paris subway, the mobile website loads four times faster, and Libération’s website now appears
higher in search engine rankings. In fact, CDNetworks’ dynamic serving technology resolves one of the problems
with responsive design, in that the latter is too slow for the EDGE network available on the Paris subway. But
thanks to dynamic serving, not only is this problem resolved but also Libération’s website – especially its mobile
one –ranks higher in Google. All this has led to a 165% jump in website traffic from smartphones.
New opportunities with no increase in hosting costs
“CDNetworks’ dynamic serving technology opens new doors for us without increasing our hosting costs.
Website maintenance is now much easier and we can change the order in which articles appear depending on
whether the website is being viewed on a computer or smartphone. We can also manage advertising differently
depending on the type of device, which is extremely useful and perfectly in line with our organization. The next
step will be to adjust the content according to whether the viewer is a subscriber – another benefit that wouldn’t
be possible without this technology that CDNetworks executes extremely well,” said Xavier
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Superior technology put to the test
During the Paris attacks in November 2015, traffic to Libération’s website jumped by a factor of 25 – but thanks
to CDNetworks’ technology, the website was able to handle the surge without a glitch. The website had up to
248,000 simultaneous connections rather than the usual 10,000, and it was one of the only news websites that
didn’t buckle. However, the website hadn’t undergone any major changes in infrastructure: just some extra RAM
on two or three servers. CDNetworks’ advanced content delivery network was able to absorb the additional traffic
by spreading it across several servers, and thereby preventing any bottlenecks.l
About Libération
Libération is a French daily newspaper available in print and online. Learn more at www.liberation.fr. About CDNetworks
CDNetworks is a global content delivery network (CDN) with fully integrated Cloud Security DDoS protection
and web application firewall. Our mission is to transform the Internet into a secure, reliable, scalable, and
high-performing Application Delivery Network. CDNetworks accelerates more than 40,000 websites and cloud
services over a network of 169 global PoPs in established and emerging markets including China and Russia. We
have been serving enterprise customers for 15 years across industries such as gaming, nance, ecommerce, high
tech, manufacturing, and media. CDNetworks offices are located in the U.S., UK, South Korea, China, Japan, and
Singapore.
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