Galati Yacht Sales Restores Website Performance With DataDome

The Problem: Unpredictable traffic spikes slowing the website.

“Our industry has really changed over the last five years,” says Mary Strauss, Marketing Director at Galati Yacht Sales. “It used to be very face-to-face, but we now rely more and more on the internet and our online connections. So we have invested significantly in our website, with the goal of attracting and converting more yacht buyers.”

Unfortunately, the website’s comprehensive listings of high-end sports fishing yachts, motor yachts and pre-owned vessels also attracted a category of visitors with very different goals than spending glorious days on the water.

“The first sign of trouble was that our website became really slow,” Mary recalls. “A lot of people are trying to set up yacht websites. They’re going in and scraping sites like ours to get the data, and then either act like brokers themselves or try to sell us the leads they generate.”

She also discovered that some of Galati’s yachts were listed on a third-party website with which they had no affiliation. Together with Gary Torrence, web developer at Galati’s web design and development agency James Ross, she started to investigate.

“We went down a rabbit hole and found significant traffic from unknown sources that obviously wasn’t human,” says Gary. “Sometimes there were patterns to it; for example, there would be a big spike every Tuesday. These visitors were also going through pages in a sequence, moving too quickly—it was clearly non-human behavior. At one point, the volume of traffic made our otherwise robust search function unusable, and it was obvious that we had to do something.”

The Solution: Easy onboarding, quick activation.

After a particularly trying night, which made abundantly clear that their WAF wasn’t up to the task, the team decided the time had come to find a more powerful solution. Gary’s online research identified a few potential options, and fast implementation being of the essence, he requested a demo and a free trial from DataDome.

“The onboarding team was extremely hands-on,” says Gary. “At the time, we were using the Sucuri CDN, for which there isn’t a preconfigured server-side module. But the DataDome solutions engineer and I worked through it together, logging directly into the server. He was really careful with the build, and we didn’t run into any real issues.”

The free trial period confirmed that bad bots represented a significant percentage of the website’s traffic, and the team decided to sign up for DataDome. The activation of the protection was scheduled for a Friday, but on Tuesday the same week, bots were hitting hard once again.

“I called DataDome and said hey, can we activate sooner?” Mary smiles. “And in a couple of hours, we were live.”

Shortly after, the team decided to switch to the Cloudflare CDN. This time, the setup was even easier: DataDome can be implemented as a Cloudflare app, which only requires a few clicks in the Cloudflare console.

“Once our own migration process was completed, we got on the phone with DataDome, and it literally took five minutes to implement,” Gary confirms. “I was actually asking: is that it?!”

The Results: High website performance, brand protection, & peace of mind.

When we ask about the main benefit of the DataDome implementation, Mary’s answer is immediate: peace of mind.

“I’m not the technical expert; I only know just enough to be dangerous,” she laughs. “But the overall responsibility for the website falls on my shoulders, and we have very high expectations for it. Now, there’s one less thing to worry about. We have a lot of weekend traffic, but I’m no longer spending my time off worrying that scraper bots are ruining the experience for our yacht buyers.”

She adds: “In addition to website performance, it’s also a question of image and brand reputation. We do share our listings with other brokerage houses, but it’s done the right way. Our partners are members of our professional organization, and they are knowledgeable about the yachts they are trying to sell. We’re very careful about where and how we’re represented, and we don’t want to be associated with these rogue sites. It’s just not who we are. This is also something I don’t need to think about anymore.”

With regards to commercial bots—some of which are beneficial, others not so much—the team uses DataDome’s powerful custom rules function to maintain complete control over their traffic.

“It’s very easy, for example, to manage third-party bots like SEO tools. We can allow-list those whose services are useful for us, and block those we don’t want to crawl our site,” Gary confirms.

In the beginning, both of them received daily email bot traffic reports from DataDome, but Mary has since switched to a weekly report.

“If I see something unusual in the report, I’ll check the dashboard or call Gary. But again, I don’t really worry about bots anymore. I’m comfortable that I can look at it once a week, and that’s enough,” she concludes.