The client:

Deporvillage is Spain’s leading online sports retailer. The Barcelona-based company is now expanding its presence in France, Italy, and Portugal, and ultimately hopes to market its products globally.

The website specialises in products for cycling, running, triathlon, swimming, gym, and outdoor sports, and currently offers more than 60,000 products from about 560 premium brands. Deporvillage has more than 800,000 customers and its website sees more than 30 million visits per month. 

The challenge:

Deporvillage has been experiencing double-digit annual growth for several years while expanding throughout Europe. The company routinely receives one million unique page views and more than 2,000 orders per day – and exponentially more during promotional periods, such as Black Friday or special sales.

Deporvillages engineering team was struggling to manage costs and deliver responsive web experiences. They bore the cost of using Amazon S3 to store and serve a growing number of product images. They also needed to ensure all images were responsive and optimised for size and speed, since mobile devices accounted for about 70% of its web traffic, and about 55% of all conversion was mobile. The team estimates that they would need at least 10 different versions of every image to fit all of the form factors.

Complicating matters even more was the fact that Deporvillage managed its website in six different languages and needed to constantly add or remove images for high-turnover to items, or to address seasonal promotions.

The strategy:

To help improve the media workflow and address the complexity and time it took to create multiple image variants manually, Deporvillage decided to use Cloudinary’s image management software. Cloudinary enabled Deporvillage to automate the entire image processing and management workflow and ensure images are delivered in the optimal size and format with simple changes to the image URL. All images are stored in the cloud, enabling easy access and the ability to manipulate them on-the-fly.

With Cloudinary, the Deporvillage engineering team can store one image, and use the URL-based API to ensure that the optimal versions are served to each visitor and load time is kept to a minimum. Cloudinary automatically selects the most optimal image format and quality based on the image content and viewing context.

Deporville’s engineering team, which uses Google PageSpeed to benchmark page performance, pointed out that without automation, workflow would be extremely difficult. In order to manually create the correct format, quality, and resolution of each image for each browser and viewport, they would have to create at least six versions of each image, store them, and add the delivery logic – a process that could take 20 minutes for each image and require exponentially more storage.

According to one team member, “Cloudinary eliminates these hassles for us. If we had toreplicate that manually, it would be too complex, expensive, and cumbersome to maintain. Plus, we’d need a design team that was four times larger.”

The result:

Using Cloudinary, Deporvillage can process a batch of images for 1,000 products dynamically on an on-demand basis, every two to three weeks. Doing this manually would take the company’s three-person design team at least two more weeks, on average. Measured results include:

• 30+% faster page load time
• 240+ man-hours saved every month
• Faster product launch cycles

Cloudinary also centralises digital asset management across the six different language versions of the website. Each site uses the same versions of the asset. One user commented: Our website is now responsive, and it’s easy to change the designs of our pages whenever we want to. Cloudinary works all of the time; it’s one less thing we have to worry about.”

The team also noted that for displaying images with Cloudinary, the logic required within HTML is minimal, compared to other solutions. This translates into fewer bugs and maintenance requirements. 

A spokesperson for Deporvillage said: “Cloudinary ensures that the images we use follow specific benchmarks and keep us on top of the latest trends that visitors would expect on websites like ours. Serving the most optimal version of images, on the right background; generating new variants; or applying image transformations – these are all things that Cloudinary does very well.”