Case Study: GreatSchools achieves 3-5 extra development weeks per quarter with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager

Front-end engineering team gains 3 to 5 more weeks per quarter for developing new content

GreatSchools is a national nonprofit that helps parents find and support great PK–12 schools through GreatSchools.org, which serves about one million page views per day and contains profiles of 200,000 schools plus extensive articles and resources. Site performance affects search ranking and user experience, and front-end engineers were spending significant time manually optimizing assets—about three engineers investing roughly a week per quarter—to try to keep page loads under the 20-second target during heavy traffic periods.

GreatSchools deployed Riverbed’s Stingray Traffic Manager 9.0 with Aptimizer web content optimization, which automated compression, caching and other optimizations. The change freed up an estimated 3–5 weeks per quarter for developing new functionality (including mobile improvements), reduced bandwidth by an additional 40–50% from Aptimizer on top of 30–40% from the ADC, and cut home-page load time to an average 12.877 seconds, improving user experience and reducing infrastructure costs.

GreatSchools

Christopher Shumway

Systems Engineer