Customer story: STAFFLINK improves real estate website performance with Tinify CDN
“We are very focused on performance because the websites we build have very large quantities of images and they have to be very high-resolution. To give you an example, we serve up about 200GB of images alone from one website. So it didn’t just speed up the website when we use Tinify CDN, it was speeding up that import process.”
Matt Neal, Project Manager at STAFFLINK
STAFFLINK is a leading Australian company that provides digital solutions for the real estate industry. With a dedicated team of professionals, they help real estate professionals improve property management operations and increase productivity.
In the online world of real estate, a big challenge is cramming in tons of high-resolution images for potential house buyers to view. Unfortunately, these images that are large in size contribute to sluggish website performance – imagine eager visitors seeking their dream home, only to be met with the frustrating spinning loading icon. To conquer this challenge, STAFFLINK uses Tinify CDN to build faster real estate websites.
Key results:
- Efficient image handling: With Tinify CDN, STAFFLINK optimizes their clients’ image delivery process. Instead of manually resizing images for various screen sizes, they now upload raw images to their Amazon S3 bucket and let Tinify handle resizing and compression. This streamlined approach reduced manual efforts and improved efficiency.
- Faster website load times: By serving optimized images through Tinify CDN, STAFFLINK significantly improved the loading times of their clients’ websites. This enhancement is particularly crucial for real estate websites, where high-resolution property images are integral to the user experience.
- Simplified workflow: STAFFLINK no longer needed to spend time on image compression and resizing, allowing their developers to focus on other aspects of website development and optimization.
- Cost-effective solution: Tinify CDN’s competitive pricing structure appealed to STAFFLINK as the initial pricing tier provided an affordable entry point, making it feasible for them to scale their usage as needed.
Background: Looking for efficient image delivery
STAFFLINK’s project manager Matt Neal explained that uploading and storing images on Amazon S3 prompted them to explore the need for a reliable Content Delivery Network (CDN) to optimize image delivery. During their search, Tinify CDN came up as a solid option:
“I’ve been using Tinify’s website to compress images since 2014. It does a really good job, it’s fast and free. Then I came across Tinify CDN when I was looking for alternatives to serving large amounts of high-resolution images.”
According to Matt, Tinify CDN was exactly what the team was looking for – it had the usual characteristics of a CDN while offering the option to compress and resize images on the fly:
“Our property listing pages typically present around 30 high-resolution images each. If we served them in their raw format, we’d literally have about 100 MB worth of images on one single page load. That’s just not possible.”
Matt Neal, Project Manager at STAFFLINK
Solution: Implementing Tinify CDN to automate image resizing and compression
Before implementing Tinify CDN, managing hundreds of property uploads involved a time-consuming process of resizing and compressing images:
“It’s a very long process dealing with hundreds of properties a day. Before, we’d wrestle with downloading, converting, resizing – you name it – so we were able to cut all that out. The first load might have a tiny delay as Tinify CDN works its compression magic, but all the heavy lifting is on its end, not ours.”
With an Image CDN like Tinify’s, STAFFLINK streamlined its image processing workflow, resulting in a significant speed boost in page loads. They solved the challenges tied to handling large images by automatically serving compressed, properly sized visuals. According to Matt, this is a “pretty big deal”:
“We are very focused on performance because the websites we build have very large quantities of images and they have to be very high-resolution. To give you an example, we serve up about 200GB of images alone from one website. So it didn’t just speed up the website when we use the CDN, it was speeding up that import process.”
Matt Neal, Project Manager at STAFFLINK
In addition, Matt says that Tinify CDN stands out from other providers due to its straightforward configuration. While considering alternatives, he found that many were either too complex or restrictive in terms of customization: “I spent maybe 30 minutes to an hour trying to get another CDN to work. And there were a whole bunch of issues. So then I went with Tinify, I tested it and it worked straight away.”
Conclusion
STAFFLINK, an Australian digital solutions provider for real estate, implemented Tinify CDN to automatically resize and compress hundreds of their clients’ property images. This results in quicker website loading times for STAFFLINK’s clients, positively impacting the experience of potential homebuyers. For STAFFLINK, Tinify CDN allowed them to simplify their workflow with just a few clicks, saving them from the trouble of resizing and compressing images using many time-consuming tools.
Need a way to make your image-heavy website load faster? Give Tinify CDN a try with our free trial!