How Michelin Experiences Used Sitecore Content Hub to Optimize Images on Their Image-Heavy Website?

Michelin Experiences, the publisher of the renowned Michelin Guides, found themselves struggling to manage the vast number of high-resolution food images on their global restaurant guide websites. The sheer quantity of unoptimized images led to slow page load times, impacting user experience.

To overcome this challenge, Michelin Experiences adopted Sitecore Content Hub to centralize and optimize its digital assets. Sitecore's digital asset management (DAM) solution gave them the capabilities required to streamline their image-heavy websites.

Automated Image Optimization

At the core of Sitecore Content Hub is an intelligent DAM system that can automatically perform essential image optimizations like:

• Resizing images to appropriate dimensions for different layouts and viewports.
• Converting formats to produce smaller file sizes, e.g. WebP.
• Applying smart compression to reduce image payload without visible quality loss.

During ingestion into the DAM, Michelin could configure these auto-optimization settings to be applied to images based on their usage - hero banners, food photos, chef profiles, etc. This automated process saved massive manual effort.

Responsive Image Delivery

With users accessing their restaurant guides on anything from smartphones to 4K monitors, responsive images were critical for Michelin.

Sitecore Content Hub provided out-of-the-box support for responsive image standards like sizes. As images were published from the DAM to the web servers, the appropriate image rendition for each device and browser was intelligently served for optimal visual quality and performance.

Distributed Image Delivery

Large uncompressed images directly served from origin servers caused high latency and unreliable performance for Michelin.

Sitecore Content Hub integrates with content delivery networks (CDN) like Akamai to distribute image delivery. Images are cached at CDN edge locations closer to users, speeding up load times. This also reduced the load on Michelin's origins.

Flexible Imaging Pipelines

Michelin's developers could leverage Sitecore's APIs and SDKs to create custom imaging pipelines tailored to their unique use cases. For example:

• Ensuring consistent orientations and cropping for food photos
• Adding overlays or watermarks to brand images
• Automated thumbnail generation with smart face detection and framing

This helped them further refine and control the optimization of images from their DAM system before publication.

The Results

With Sitecore Content Hub managing over 50,000 images across their websites, Michelin Experiences achieved:

• 60% reduction in image file sizes
• 4X faster page load speeds
• Increased user engagement and traffic

Automated DAM-powered optimizations, responsive image handling, and CDN integrations gave them the tools to effectively manage their image-heavy websites for the best user experience.

Conclusion

Michelin Experiences' success demonstrates the value of using enterprise-grade DAM solutions like Sitecore Content Hub to gain control over image-heavy digital experiences. Intelligent and automated management of assets across their lifecycle can drive significant web performance gains.