Case Study: Libération achieves 4x faster mobile site performance, 165% mobile traffic growth and surge resilience with CDNetworks dynamic serving

French Newspaper Libération Boosts Dynamic Serving With Cdnetworks

Libération, a major French daily with about 20 million visits and up to 80 million page views a month, faced slow mobile page loads and declining SEO after adopting responsive design—pages meant for desktop were still being delivered in full to smartphones, making browsing on slow networks (like the Paris subway’s EDGE) tedious and limiting reach during traffic surges. The digital team needed a way to deliver fast, device-optimized pages without major infrastructure changes or higher hosting costs.

By switching to CDNetworks’ dynamic serving (implemented with a simple configuration and no extra fee), Libération launched separate mobile and desktop outputs under the same URLs in September 2015. The result: mobile pages load four times faster, mobile traffic rose 165%, Google rankings improved, the site became readable on the Paris subway, and the platform handled a 25× traffic spike during the November 2015 attacks (up to 248,000 simultaneous connections) with only minimal server upgrades.

Liberation

Xavier Grangier

Head of Digital Technology