While working as director of e-commerce for the Linen Chest home goods retailer, Riaz Farideh immediately ran into a problem. He found himself running a site whose page load time ranged from 6 to 30 seconds. The Linen Chest site was heavy, the images were hosted in the source, and the code was never refactored and needed optimization. Riaz knew that she needed to make some changes, and fast.
“The day I got here, I had to get down to business. There was no time for experiments.
As a former programmer, Riaz knew the importance of performance for his e-commerce website. In his opinion, higher performance means higher conversion rates.
“Customers should load the page in 2-3 seconds. If you can achieve this, they may be browsing the site longer, resulting in more sessions. And the more sessions, the more sales.
Drawing on his extensive experience in e-commerce, Riaz realized that high-quality images are effective in attracting online shoppers, but they also represent a barrier to online navigation. In evaluating Linen Chest’s image strategy, Riaz saw several areas where he could reap the benefits of web performance by leveraging a cloud-based image optimization solution. So what did he do next? Contact Akamai for help.
“At my previous company, I saw what Akamai can do as a platform and how it can help retailers. It wasn’t difficult for me, I immediately turned to Akamai and they proved me right.”
Using Akamai’s Image and Video Manager, Linen Chest was able to address page weight and page performance issues by streamlining workflows, automating creation and management, and optimizing page delivery and download. website images.
“We can now deliver the highest quality images at 2x resolution without fear of customer delays.”
The impact was not limited to workflows. Linen Chest achieved unmatched quality and produced lighter, faster pages. As a result, site performance improved across a variety of metrics, supporting Riaz’s hypothesis that better performance can significantly improve business results.
“Without adding new traffic sources, we’ve seen higher engagement: more pageviews, sessions, and conversions. Akamai’s capabilities and Image Manager have played a significant role in this growth.”
Optimizing images for maximum visual quality and performance improves the end user experience on websites and mobile apps. Automated optimization can reduce image preparation time and reduce the cost and effort of creating and converting images, speeding time to market. Cloud storage and image delivery reduce storage costs and use real user data to intelligently deliver the best image to each end user.
image difference
THEN: Cropping and resizing images from a “master” image was done manually.
NOW: Image & Video Manager saves time and effort and reduces human error by automatically generating multiple sizes and variations for marketing and product images.
THEN: Converting CMYK images to RGB images was done manually and Linen Chest did not have the ability to create separate WebP image files for Chrome browsers.
NOW: Color conversion and file format requirements are automatically handled by Image & Video Manager.
THEN: Heavy images were hosted in the source and then loaded into your uploader, resulting in slow performance and image sizes that weren’t suitable for mobile and tablet shoppers.
NOW: Images are hosted on Akamai NetStorage, significantly reducing the number of requests to the source and increasing downloads. Images are also automatically resized to fit the viewable area of the requesting device’s screen.
THEN: To avoid client-side image lag, especially on mobile, creatives were forced to compress and downsize images significantly instead of using the sharp, high-resolution images they needed.
NOW: The image perception and video management algorithm reduces the number of bytes without affecting the perceived quality of the image. This means mobile users get richer images without performance degradation, and Creative can deliver 2x resolution images for higher pixel density displays.
