After comparing different image solutions, Zadig&Voltaire chose imgix. And the fact that imgix went above and beyond CDN hosting capabilities really helped move the needle for Zadig&Voltaire.

“Of course, there's a lot of tech behind it, but in the end, it's a tool for which I don't need special skills for myself or a member of the business team to just change the quality of any picture. So it's a very technical solution, but it can be used by any team, not just the developer or the CTO.”

— Jonathan Attali, Director of Marketing and Digital

Some of the imgix parameters that Zadig&Voltaire use include:

• q enable setting output quality lower than the default when serving high-DPR images.
• cs specifies the color space of the output image.
• lossless enables delivery of lossless images in formats that support lossless compression (JPEG XR and WEBP).
• fit controlled the way the output image fits to its target dimensions after resizing and how background areas get filled.
• auto helps to automate a baseline level of optimization across your entire image catalog.

“imgix is not just a server that hosts some images,” Attali said. “ The knowledge and the data to best optimize website images is imgix’s job. We could have gone with any other solution - GCP, Google Platform - but they are not experts like imgix.”

One very important consideration for Zadig&Voltaire was their implementation of the Progressive Web Application. A Progressive Web App, or PWA for short, is a website designed to create user experiences closer to mobile-native than in-browser ones. By design, PWAs are optimized to create a smooth and fast experience for users.

“It’s only one load of the page and after that, you click, but you never load all the content and all CSS, etc. The only thing that changes on each page is the image, because if you have the same CSS on the website, you don’t load it again,” Attali explained. “So between the homepage, PLP, then PDP, the main change you have to load is the image.”

Because of this, he noted, loading a page requires having the image correctly optimized in order to keep the experience seamless for the user.

“So performance and response time of imgix was very important when we chose the PWA for the front.”