Livspace - Case Study

Ken Jones
July 6th, 2020


Quickly Delivering One Stop For Home Interiors is the trusted brand for complete home interior design for thousands of homeowners. Touted as “…the Uber of home design,” has changed the way people design their homes and is available in nine Indian cities so far and is now in Singapore. As a company that is solely reliant on online sales, knows that decreasing their page load time is critical for attracting and keeping shoppers on their site. Their wide product selection and high-quality images posed a problem for, especially on mobile. Additionally, had to figure out how to overcome the slow bandwidth in Asia for a fast mobile user experience (UX). How can an image-intensive eCommerce platform speed up its UX for mobile-based customers in Asia? evaluated and chose ImageEngine by ScientiaMobile.’s extensive tests showed that ImageEngine effectively tailors images to each mobile device and delivers them quickly through its content delivery network (CDN). Here’s what they found…

Livspace Payload and Time Summary-02

“Optimizing our website images reduced image payload by 89% and greatly accelerated page loading by 50%. Faster loading helped grow our mobile customer base. We reduced bounce rates by 25% and increased sales conversions.”

Praveen Kumar, Director of Engineering,

The Problem

For, they had repeated problems with high-resolution images, that would not appear properly on all devices. These images needed to scale for different variations in mobile, tablet, and desktop screen sizes. Knowing the average customer used their mobile phone for purchasing, it was crucial to make a UX that worked for the mobile audience. To attract and convert mobile visitors, they knew they needed to accelerate how fast their site loaded. had already implemented a traditional CDN, but it only slightly improved performance. In addition, the increasing number of customer visits were rapidly driving CDN costs higher. needed a solution to accelerate their website, improve conversions, and control future CDN operating costs.

A major opportunity for improving website speed was to reduce’s image payload without sacrificing image quality. On mobile devices, these images were heavier than they needed to be. Higher resolution and file size did not yield perceptible differences in user experience. If could reduce their image payload, then mobile pages would load faster.

The ImageEngine Solution

Livspace How it Works Graphic 2 tested ImageEngine’s resizing CDN service to address their image acceleration challenges. ImageEngine is unique because it seamlessly combines three services.

First, ImageEngine leverages ScientiaMobile’s WURFL device detection to identify the devices coming to’s website. Once detected, ImageEngine uses intelligence about the device to drive image resizing and compression. For example, ImageEngine detects screen and viewport dimensions, screen resolution (PPI ratio), operating system, and image file types supported. It proactively detects device information without using slow, cumbersome JavaScript.

Second, ImageEngine leverages this device information to automatically resize, convert, and compress images in real-time. It resizes only when images are requested. ImageEngine also caches images, so there is no need to resize them for subsequent requests from identical devices.

Third, ImageEngine uses its global image CDN with device-aware edge servers. This means that ImageEngine’s logic is pushed to the edge of its global network. Images are cached as close to customers as possible, resulting in a 50% faster web page download time.

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The Deployment started their roll-out of ImageEngine by performing A/B tests on specific mobile devices. Immediately, saw a speed improvement when measuring using independent third-party tools like WebPageTest. They tested on different devices and operating systems and were able to see a very good image resolution across all the devices they tested.

They also saved development time. Previously, developers had custom-scaled and written code to serve different image sizes based on device type. This former process was time-consuming and frequently failed to yield good UX results. This high-cost manual process was nowhere as effective as what ImageEngine provided, so abandoned the process and removed the custom code after onboarding ImageEngine. used CNAME DNS records to direct traffic through ImageEngine. Immediately, ImageEngine’s compression began to yield speed improvements versus’s legacy CDN approach.

ImageEngine’s simplicity and ScientiaMobile’s 24/7 support made this roll-out quick and streamlined. also enjoyed an easy deployment with minimal switching costs.

The Results

Final Image Format Savings-Livspace

After running ImageEngine, achieved an 89% savings on their image payload. On a monthly basis,’s image payload was reduced by more than 2,000 GBs per month, resulting in major CDN cost savings and an increase in mobile visits. Since many of Livspace’s visitors use the Chrome browser on either desktop or smartphones, ImageEngine optimized images and delivered in the efficient WebP format. On average, images delivered in WebP saw payload savings of 92%.

Page load time accelerated by 50%, cutting load time from over 13 seconds to just 6.3 seconds on many pages.’s Director of Engineering, Praveen Kumar stated, “Faster loading helped grow our mobile customer base. We reduced bounce rates by 25% and increased sales conversions. ”

Internally, the simplification of the image workflow for the team enabled their IT and DevOps staff to focus on more strategic eCommerce issues.