About
Specsavers is a leading optical retail chain specializing in affordable eye care and hearing services. Founded over 40 years ago by Doug and Mary Perkins, Specsavers has grown to become the largest privately-owned optical group in the world, with stores in 11 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Specsavers offers a wide range of products and services, including eye tests, glasses, contact lenses, and hearing devices. They are known for their commitment to providing high-quality, affordable optical and hearing care, aiming to change lives through better sight and hearing.
In addition to retail services, Specsavers places a strong emphasis on training and development, including apprenticeships and roles in clinical, retail, and support office settings. Their development programs are designed to nurture talent and provide employees with the skills needed to advance in their careers.
How do they use Cloudflare
Specsavers first began their Cloudflare journey by using Cloudflare’s CDN to accelerate their websites. When Specsavers, in conjunction with their partner BJSS, first started leveraging Cloudflare’s network, Workers and KV were fairly new services, and the team began to experiment with these tools to see what additional improvements could be made to Specsavers’ websites.
When looking to modernize their websites, the Specsavers team turned to another public cloud provider, but Specsavers found themselves running into limitations around scaling and flexibility. The team was hoping to implement a more modern front-end deployment strategy, and turned to Cloudflare Pages to ultimately run their global web deployments.
To optimize their CI/CD strategy, Specsavers has gone all in on Cloudflare Pages to manage hundreds of staging and production branches at scale. The team runs approximately 10 front-end projects across 10 different markets, meaning that at any given point, over 100 front-end Pages deployments run live. Each Pages project serves as a micro frontend, running both with a production and preview branch. Pages provides flexibility for the development team to collaborate in a very speedy fashion, and allows the development team to spin up and take down new projects with ease. The team loves the fact that Pages can run locally, reliably, and scalably.
Specsavers now uses Workers to intelligently route and direct traffic and API requests to the correct pages projects. Specsavers also has Cloudflare Workers interact with Workers KV to determine paths across their infrastructure. The development team designed KV to help isolate certain aspects of their websites. The team leverages JSON KV Objects to decide URL paths, effectively allowing KV to control and govern their routing rules via headers.
