The Customer
Judge.me is a product review app that helps e-commerce sites improve conversion rates, buyer engagement, and organic traffic. With over 116,000 customers, Judge.me serves almost 1.25 million product images and avatars, which means their image processing is crucial - especially as user-generated images can create additional challenges. By standardizing, processing, and delivering images with imgix, Judge.me improved page load time from one second to 100 milliseconds — nearly 10 times faster.
The Challenge
Judge.me works with more than 116,000 e-commerce customers to power product reviews. The fast-growing review engine allows end-users to easily incorporate images into their feedback. With applications in Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce, Judge.me wanted to ensure that they could easily and effectively host the images of user-generated content.
Before using imgix, Judge.me served images directly from S3. Image loading was slow and the workflow was expensive to maintain.
In addition, Judge.me faced many challenges posed by user-generated content. From over-exposure and varying dimensions to extra blank space, user-generated content can be tricky to deal with.
They looked for a solution that offers global support, fast asset delivery, and easy deployment – all at a cost that wouldn’t break the bank.
"We tend to use the high-end solutions. We also look for easy-to-use APIs for our developers."
- Peter-Jan Celis, Founder & CEO
The Solution
Judge.me started with imgix straight out of the gate for their review photos on their Product Reviews plugin, serving just under 1.25 million product images and avatars. imgix supports user-generated content for Judge.me, both thumbnail and full-size images, on their own site as well as on their customer sites. This allows users to easily incorporate their own content into their design and adjust it automatically. It also ensures that every image has the right size, quality, and dimensions, which is incredibly important to Judge.me.
Judge.me uses many of the Rendering API parameters. The top three are as follows:
- auto establishes an automated baseline level of optimization for their images.
- dpr controls the output density of your image.
- size allows you to control all aspects of resizing, cropping, and the fit-to-crop operations.
Judge.me serves customers from all around the world. By using the imgix CDN, they reduce page-load speed and improve the user experience. With CDN edge nodes located in six continents, imgix caches images to minimize latency and reduce transfer times when delivering images.
The Results
With imgix, Judge.me improved their average page load response time from one second to 100 milliseconds - nearly 10 times faster than what they had with the previous solution.
When Judge.me made the important decision to make review images and video features free for all customer websites, they needed to ensure that each feature component, especially image optimization, was reliable and cost-effective.
"The fact that we felt comfortable making this feature completely free, which is going to end up costing us quite a bit more, shows our trust in imgix. With imgix, it feels like everything is the way it should be, it’s logical."
- Peter-Jan Celis, Founder & CEO
