A Decade of Partnership: The Container Store Elevates Digital Performance with Yottaa Web Performance Services

About The Container Store

The Container Store is the nation’s leading specialty retailer dedicated to helping customers organize their lives through innovative storage and organization solutions. With a strong omnichannel strategy and growing eCommerce business, the company continues to expand its digital footprint to deliver the same exceptional experience online that shoppers expect in-store. 

For nearly a decade, The Container Store has partnered with Yottaa to ensure its online shopping experience reflects the same efficiency and reliability as its products. What began as a focused performance initiative has evolved into a long-standing partnership that now powers every aspect of the brand’s digital delivery. 

Today, The Container Store runs on Yottaa Web Performance Services (WPS), a fully managed solution that combines Fastly Edge Cloud, HUMAN Security, and Yottaa’s Web Performance Cloud. Together, these platforms ensure the brand’s eCommerce storefront is consistently fast, secure, and reliable. 

A Modernized Foundation for Performance

The Container Store first partnered with Yottaa in 2016, beginning with Yottaa’s CDN and WAF to strengthen site speed and security as online demand accelerated. As their digital ecosystem expanded, so did the performance and protection requirements behind the scenes. To maintain reliability at scale, The Container Store broadened its footprint with Yottaa — adopting bot protection capabilities now part of the HUMAN Sightline Cyberfraud Defense Platform (formerly PerimeterX). This helped the team stay ahead of rising automated traffic and ensure consistent, high-quality shopper experiences. 

By 2025, The Container Store was ready to modernize its entire delivery layer. When Yottaa introduced Web Performance Services (WPS) — a fully managed infrastructure built on Fastly Edge Cloud, HUMAN Defense, and Yottaa Web Performance Cloud — the brand migrated from the legacy Yottaa CDN to Fastly under Yottaa’s management. The transition, completed in early 2025, created a unified offering for performance, delivery, and security. 

Yottaa’s Technical Account team collaborated closely with The Container Store’s engineers to configure caching, streamline content delivery, and ensure that 43 key third-party integrations run efficiently, maintaining functionality without adding friction to the shopper journey. 

This modernization also strengthened the brand’s protection layer. In a single recent week, Yottaa routed 32 million requests to HUMAN, with 3.9 million blocked for malicious or suspicious behavior — automated defense that now serves as a core pillar of their digital stability. 

“The hard part for us is often figuring out why something’s happening,” said Ed Iwanski, Solution Architect at The Container Store. “Having Yottaa as a technical expert and resource means we can identify and resolve performance issues quickly instead of spending hours investigating.” 

Continuous Optimization and Measurable Performance

With Yottaa managing ongoing optimization, The Container Store’s site now consistently meets top performance benchmarks. Real-user data confirms an average page load time of 2.49 seconds, with Core Web Vitals showing strong overall site health — LCP at 2.05s and INP at 128ms (both rated “Good”). 

These results are validated and sustained through Yottaa Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Core Web Vitals Diagnostics, which gives The Container Store full visibility into how shoppers experience the site every day. Rather than waiting for issues to surface, the team uses Yottaa’s insights to understand performance shifts and make targeted improvements as the site evolves. 

Operationally, Yottaa’s Technical Account Manager plays a hands-on role in day-to-day performance operations, leading weekly caching and configuration updates. This includes purging stale content, tuning cache rules, updating paths that should be cached, and troubleshooting objects that unexpectedly miss cache. By offloading this work, The Container Store’s developers can stay focused on high-impact initiatives. 

This partnership also extends into critical operational workflows. When The Container Store syncs online and in-store inventory, Fastly’s instant cache purge, scripted with guidance and validation from Yottaa, runs daily to refresh both static assets and HTML. This ensures inventory changes appear on the site in real time, preventing outdated product states and maintaining shopper trust. 

And while The Container Store uses its own internal DevOps tools to detect anomalies, Yottaa’s monitoring platform serves as a key diagnostic companion. The teams frequently use Yottaa’s visibility to investigate caching behavior, validate fixes, and understand performance shifts — working in lockstep to maintain a fast, stable experience. 

Results and Partnership Impact

After nearly a decade, The Container Store and Yottaa continue to evolve together. What started as a performance-focused engagement has grown into a strategic partnership built on trust, technical expertise, and measurable stability. 

By moving to Web Performance Services (WPS) and relying on Yottaa’s managed model, The Container Store has reduced the operational burden on its internal teams while gaining a more resilient and secure infrastructure. With roughly 90% of requests now served at the edge, Fastly and Yottaa significantly reduce origin load, helping keep the site responsive even as traffic and complexity grow. 

“The team at Yottaa is a key partner for the Container Store,” said Michael Kallstrom, Director — IT & Security Operations at The Container Store.  “Whether we are discussing new website changes, working on technical issues, or working through our certification efforts, we know we can count on them.” 

Looking ahead, The Container Store and Yottaa are continuing to build on this foundation, using shared visibility, ongoing optimization, and a managed-edge approach to support new digital initiatives while keeping performance and reliability firmly under control.