CHALLENGE

Tessloff Verlag is one of Germany's leading educational publishers and the company behind the WAS IST WAS series, published in more than 45 languages and distributed across over 100 countries.

As its digital ecosystem expanded, Tessloff relied on Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) to support growing traffic volumes and content delivery demands. The company was approaching the limits of its 48-million content request subscription tier, while increasing request volumes were driving higher Adobe consumption and placing additional load on the platform.

A large portion of traffic was bypassing caching layers and reaching AEM directly, further increasing consumption and limiting scalability. At the same time, growing website traffic was not translating into a proportional increase in online shop revenue. The balance between AEM investment and business value was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Tessloff needed to reduce unnecessary origin traffic and content request consumption, improve cache efficiency, and create a more economically sustainable foundation for future growth.

“Without optimizing the AEM platform and significantly reducing the number of requests, the profitability of our direct-to-consumer business in the DACH region would have been at serious risk.” - Manuel Schmidt, Fractional CMO, Tessloff Verlag

SOLUTION

Cyber64 analyzed Tessloff’s entire content delivery chain to identify why millions of requests were bypassing caching layers and unnecessarily consuming AEM resources. The analysis covered AEM architecture, CDN behavior, dispatcher configuration, caching rules, DAM asset delivery, traffic patterns, and Adobe license utilization.

The project was carried out in collaboration with Tractionwise, whose analytics expertise provided valuable insights into traffic and user behavior, helping ensure that the technical optimization was aligned with Tessloff’s broader digital business objectives.

RESULTS

Following the optimization initiative, Tessloff achieved significant improvements in cache efficiency, platform performance, and Adobe license utilization.

Key Results

• More than 36.7 million requests were served directly from cache
• Overall cache HIT ratio increased from 45.94% to 70.46%, allowing more visitor requests to be served without consuming Adobe resources.
• Image cache HIT ratio increased from 39.83% to 91.75%, allowing nearly 12.7 million image requests to be served directly from cache.
• PASS requests dropped from 43.77% to 7.07%, significantly reducing unnecessary traffic reaching AEM infrastructure.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) performance score increased from 31 to 73, a 135% improvement, creating a stronger foundation for future traffic growth.

BUSINESS IMPACT

The optimization gave Tessloff a more sustainable foundation for scaling its digital business without Adobe consumption and licensing costs growing at the same pace as traffic.

With significantly more requests served from cache, Tessloff reduced its dependency on AEM origin infrastructure, improved platform scalability, and reduced operational risk during peak traffic periods.

Most importantly, the project created a roadmap toward reducing effective content request consumption from 48 million to 24 million requests, potentially cutting consumption by up to 50% while creating greater capacity for future growth.

“After the optimization, we were able to bring the platform back to a sustainable and economically viable foundation while significantly improving cost efficiency.” - Manuel Schmidt, Fractional CMO, Tessloff Verlag