When shopping online, customers can't touch products, as they do in physical stores. That’s why product images are crucial; they help customers understand what they are buying and inspire them to buy it. In fact, only three percent of U.S. internet users never search for visual content prior to making a purchase. If you think about it, images are your products, so you need to treat them with care.

Unfortunately, serving high-quality images comes at a cost: page load time. Beautiful but heavy images can hurt your SEO, customer experience, and conversion rate. As you can guess, the goal is to find the right balance between image quality and weight. Still, too often image optimization is seen as a low priority and thus forgotten. Or the prospect of managing dozens of image types seems overwhelming. These days, the number of devices we need to address has become quite large. The traditional approach of simply generating "thumb," "normal," and "zoom" versions of your origin images is no longer enough. To get the most out of your images, you need to serve the right format to the right device.

In this article, we will discuss how to build a simple yet powerful, as well as SEO-friendly, e-commerce image server. It's a stack and workflow that we at Commerce Layer have battle-tested in production for many clients. Today, you can easily adapt these guidelines to your own use case in a few steps.

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Last week, we integrated Google Sign-In into our sign-in process, a move that offers imgix users additional convenience, security, and control. Now you can access your Dashboard without having to retain a separate password, while also gaining the security benefits of Google’s two-factor authentication. Account owners have more control as well, as they can decide which sign-in methods are available to their users.

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These days, API services are helping to optimize workflows that used to take teams countless hours to complete with home-grown solutions. Some examples include Stripe for capturing payments, Algolia for implementing search, and, of course, imgix for optimizing images on the fly using their API-first image processing platform.

Cosmic JS is a drop-in replacement for WordPress that provides a dashboard to create content and API tools and resources to integrate content into any application. Commonly referred to as a Headless CMS, Cosmic JS allows developers to skip the installation, configuration, and maintenance processes of installed CMS infrastructure so they can focus on what really matters: creating great products and user experiences.

Our Cosmic JS Extensions provide developers with a custom canvas to build integrations with third-party services in the Cosmic JS Bucket Dashboard. Now, we’re excited to introduce our new imgix Image Editor Extension, which allows our users to access imgix’s image optimization and transformation capabilities through a GUI (graphical user interface).

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We all know how important it is to ensure your website loads quickly. Speed is vital to the success of your website; countless tests have shown that page load speed directly impacts your revenue, pages per visit, and user engagement. And guess what accounts for more than half the weight of the average website? Images! In this post, I’m going to show you how to identify opportunities to optimize your images, which will in turn improve the speed of your site.

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Resizing a vast database of images to fit a fixed-size image container—as is often required for profile photos or product images—can be a truly daunting (and thankless) task. In a previous post, we demonstrated how imgix’s fit=fill and fit=fillmax parameters offer a simple solution by allowing you to automatically resize images and fill in any excess space with a single solid color. Now, we’re excited to increase the scope and flexibility of fit=fill and fit=fillmax with a new parameter, blur.

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An updated Privacy Policy will go into effect May 25, 2018. In order to ensure that all imgix customers working with the data of EU citizens are able to continue to do so, imgix has become GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant. These changes reflect our efforts.

These changes to the imgix Privacy Policy will go into effect for all customers on May 25, 2018. You may review the new Privacy Policy at https://www.imgix.com/privacy.

By continuing to use our services on or after May 25, 2018, you indicate your agreement with the new terms and policies that are effective as of that date. There will be no change to the functionality of the imgix service, but we do hope that you will find these updated terms beneficial. If you have any feedback, please feel free to contact us at privacy@imgix.com.