Providing an exceptional shopping experience to sports and fitness enthusiasts in Spain and throughout Europe is the primary goal of Deporvillage, a top online sports retailer. Offering more than 60,000 premium-brand products, Deporvillage is expanding in Europe and plans to grow globally. With monthly unique page views totaling 30 million on its site, which features over 8,000 images of seasonal products, the company faced a formidable challenge early on to render the site responsive on all devices at all times.
The Deporvillage engineering team summed it up well: “Our challenges were clear: costs and responsive experiences.”
Storing a high volume of product images was costly. Moreover, the tasks involved in manually adding or removing them for seasonal promotions and optimizing them for size and format, which largely accounted for site responsiveness, were time-consuming and onerous. Complicating matters was that mobile access made up about 70 percent of Deporvillage’s web traffic and roughly 55 percent of all conversions were mobile, which required different image versions to fit all screen sizes. Plus, Deporvillage is in six languages, maintained in separate sites.
Soon after adopting the Cloudinary platform, Deporvillage waved goodbye to its workflow hassles, thanks to its ability to perform these two major tasks on Cloudinary:
- Automate the entire image-management workflow, ultimately delivering images in the optimal size and format through URL-based APIs.
- Store the images in the cloud, complete with easy access and the ability to manipulate them on the fly.
Benchmarking with Google PageSpeed revealed that, without automation, Deporvillage developers would have had to manually determine the correct format, quality, and resolution of each image for each browser and viewport; create at least six versions for each image; store them; and add the delivery logic. That was a lengthy 20-minute process per image before they turned to Cloudinary.
With Cloudinary, Deporvillage can dynamically process images for 1,000 products on demand every two to three weeks. Additionally, Cloudinary saves Deporvillage hosting expense and delivers the following impressive results:
- A minimum of 30-percent reduction in page load-time
- A monthly saving of 240-plus man hours
- Faster product-launch cycles
- Centralization of digital asset management (DAM) across the site’s six-language versions
“What we love most is being carefree. It’s so much easier to change our page designs with Cloudinary behind the scenes,” said one user. To Deporvillage’s developers, not only is Cloudinary intuitive and simple to use, it also ensures superior website performance by supporting browser-specific web formats, such as Google’s WebP.
“In short, Cloudinary is exactly what is needed for dynamic, high-traffic websites like Deporvillage,” —The Deporvillage team.
