The challenge
Improving site speed without going headless
For Head of Product Mia Otte and Chief Digital Officer Felipe Araujo, Cariuma’s site speed was too far below the industry benchmarks. They felt that no matter how much they invested, they couldn’t get the site running as fast as they wanted. Aware of the impact speed can have on SEO and conversions, they were looking for bigger wins.
After asking many of their existing partners for performance suggestions, Mia and Felipe were disappointed that moving Cariuma’s Shopify Plus site to a headless infrastructure seemed like the only option.
They evaluated several providers but knew they would lose the flexibility and nimbleness of Shopify, which was the reason they chose the platform in the first place. Not to mention, they’d have to create custom integrations and build a team to manage everything.
Then their data analytics provider recommended Edgemesh, the only solution Mia and Felipe had found that would work with Shopify rather than around it.
“What we really liked was that Edgmesh had been working within the boundaries of Shopify since the beginning. They were far and away the Shopify experts and clearly thinking long term, which we always like to see with our partners.”
- Mia Otte
The solution
A performance tool that works with Shopify to create headless speed
Mia and Felipe were drawn to the Edgemesh approach, especially since Shopify had recently started enforcing their own boundaries — making a lot of the other solutions they’d evaluated irrelevant.
When the Edgemesh team offered a preview of the Cariuma site on Edgemesh, along with the expected numbers for performance improvement, Mia and Felipe were initially skeptical. They’d sat through hundreds of vendor proposals where magical results were promised before.
But the team was able to answer all their technical questions honestly and transparently. And since Edgemesh offered a month-to-month contract with no commitments and wouldn’t require them to overhaul their infrastructure, they decided they had nothing to lose by trying it out.
The onboarding process was short and simple (especially compared to the many months going headless would take). Throughout, Mia and Felipe were impressed with the Edgemesh team’s attention to detail and responsiveness, which Felipe described not only as top tier but way beyond what he’s experienced with other partners throughout his career.
And when Edgemesh turned on? Mia and Felipe finally saw the “leaps and bounds” of improvement they had been looking for in just a week.
“Edgemesh is really the only solution that gives us the speed we would get from a headless infrastructure while still using the existing Shopify infrastructure — and without all the new ways of operating, building an engineering team, and doing integrations.”
- Felipe Araujo
