For Stylight, a leading online search platform for fashion, beauty and design, uptime, performance, and customer experience greatly affect the bottom line. Available in 16 markets, the platform is visited every year by 120 million users who can search through 1,500 shops to find the best deals. Once they find their favorite product, they are redirected to one of Stylight’s partner shops where they can proceed with their purchase transaction.
Whenever a new shop goes online in one market, Stylight must integrate and display hundreds of thousands—and, at times—a million new products on its site. It’s a tall order.
With so many new products continually being added to its site and a small development team, Stylight needed an efficient way to manage and manipulate images in order to ensure that they load fast and flawlessly on all devices.
One of our earliest users, Stylight integrated Cloudinary into its search engine back in 2013. Since then, it has seen significant Cloudinary-related performance and financial benefits:
- The ability to integrate new stores with thousands of products in under two hours
- A rise in the click-out conversion rate on its product feed by up to 2.2 percent
- Growth of revenue per visit, which is tied to partner-store compensation, by up to 2.4 percent
Even with hundreds of millions of assets stored by Cloudinary today, Stylight’s development team doesn’t need to worry at all about image-related problems. As its VP of Technology, André Malo, commented, “I know I can rely on the fact that Cloudinary always works flawlessly—it’s the one stop for image assets.”
Stylight has been working with Cloudinary for SEO purposes for quite some time, with automation being one of the Cloudinary capabilities that Stylight values the most. By leveraging Cloudinary’s automatic format-selection and quality-compression features, Stylight’s team can easily optimize images and deliver the best format, such as WebP for Chrome browsers. The optimized size and format have a significant positive impact on page-load time and performance, which satisfies not only human visitors but also the Googlebot.
Stylight also benefits from Cloudinary’s multi-CDN capabilities, which dynamically switches between multiple CDNs: Akamai, Fastly, and Amazon CloudFront. Leveraging multiple CDNs plays a critical role in accelerating page loads by serving images closer to Stylight’s end-users.
“We have two types of ‘users’ on our website, both important,” explained Malo. “First, there are human visitors who expect pages to load quickly and high-quality images that resize properly. Second, there are bots, like Googlebot, that crawl our sites for indexing purposes.”
To learn more about how Stylight is optimizing for SEO and a great user experience, read the full case study.
