Siteimprove Helps Customers Analyze Website User Behavior Faster with SingleStore on AWS

Siteimprove is a global provider of cloud-based tools and services for marketing optimization and website governance. Siteimprove is a marketing performance platform purpose-built for marketers to unify efforts across teams to drive better digital experiences. Customers use Siteimprove solutions to automate website error and problem identification, improve accessibility, optimize SEO and paid campaigns, and ultimately create engaging digital content that drives marketing success and revenue growth. “We offer solutions for improving website accessibility, SEO, and user behavior analytics. We tie all that data together to help our customers optimize the experience for their end users,” says Clay Garrard, vice president of engineering at Siteimprove. With these capabilities combined in a single platform, Siteimprove helps marketers elevate their digital presence and performance by driving improved reach, reputation, revenue, and returns.

Siteimprove had long relied on a relational database platform hosted in a physical data center to run its solutions. However, that environment presented database performance challenges. “In terms of running analytical queries, relational databases aren’t really designed for high performance with the volume of data we were seeing,” Garrard says. “If it takes 3 minutes to return a query, that’s not fast enough. We have thousands of customers with tens of thousands of websites tracking user behavior data, and those customers increasingly needed near real-time data to support marketing campaigns and other initiatives.”

Scalability was another challenge. “We had a monolithic data platform in a data center, and it would be a multi-month or even multi-quarter process to add capacity to that infrastructure to support our growth,” says Garrard. “We needed to find a way to scale more quickly as we grew.”

To address its concerns around performance and scalability, Siteimprove implemented a solution from SingleStore, an AWS Partner that provides an all-in-one database for operational analytics and applications that require high-performance queries. Siteimprove uses SingleStoreDB Cloud, a distributed relational database on AWS. “AWS is our primary cloud provider, and we release new database features on AWS for our customers,” says Garrard. “In addition, SingleStore returns near real-time and historical data at high speeds and high data volumes, and there aren’t many providers capable of that.”

SingleStoreDB Cloud integrates with AWS PrivateLink, which companies can use to quickly and securely connect private services in their own virtual private cloud (VPC) to SingleStoreDB Cloud. In addition to SingleStoreDB Cloud, Siteimprove relies on services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for on-demand compute capacity and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storing customer data. “We offer a fully managed database solution on AWS, which removes the need for customers like Siteimprove to worry about infrastructure upgrades, patching, and operating system maintenance,” says Rob Weidner, director of cloud alliances at SingleStore. “Instead, Siteimprove can focus entirely on its core operations and growing its business.”

Using SingleStoreDB Cloud on AWS, Siteimprove has reduced database query return time from minutes to less than 1 second. With this performance improvement, Siteimprove is helping its customers analyze user behavior faster than before. “By returning queries in under a second, Siteimprove’s customers can quickly see how users are responding to a web campaign that was just launched,” says Jeff Cotrupe, director of customer marketing and analyst relations at SingleStore. Adds Garrard, “The SingleStore solution offers near real-time capabilities, so our customers get immediate user feedback to see what kind of traction a campaign is getting and the reasons it’s performing well or not so well. We couldn’t provide that to our customers if queries took seconds to return.”

Siteimprove can now scale its database environment on demand to accommodate a growing customer base. “Before using SingleStoreDB Cloud on AWS, it would take us months to quarters to scale our environment because we were limited by our data center,” says Garrard. “With a cloud-native platform, we can make adjustments to compute capacity whenever we need to, based on customer growth.”

Because Siteimprove has a fully managed database on AWS, the company no longer needs to spend time on new initiatives. “Because SingleStore is fully managed, I don’t have to engage my operations team to manage outages or incidents,” Garrard says. “We can spend at least 10 percent more of our time working on our product roadmap and other value-producing projects.”

Siteimprove plans to expand its relationship with SingleStore as it develops new generative AI applications and new database features. “SingleStore offers more than just SingleStoreDB Cloud,” says Garrard. “Recently, we started exploring SingleStore vector database capabilities to support AI work we’re doing. We look forward to using more SingleStore features as we bring new products to our customers.”