Mission
Most of the Internet space today consists of pictures, drawings, or other visual media. While it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it also usually requires more storage space and bandwidth for transmission than the text mentioned in the famous proverb. Sometimes even much more.
Check out this pie chart obtained from the HTTP Archive data. The average mobile homepage weight of the top 1 million websites is about 2 MB. Images account for two thirds of this weight.
Much of the content on successful websites is contributed by users, and most users are non-technical. And that's OK. Where would the web be if one had to master C++ to post an image from his phone showing him on a safari or in the jungle? Or even just to scale and compress the image before sending it?
While a successful website must make the content creation process as simple as possible, it must also pay attention to the size of images so that pages load quickly and users can get the most out of them. Images generated by various devices, such as a digital camera or design application, are rarely optimized for size. For example, an image taken with your new smartphone can easily be over 4 MB, while a decent web page should weigh no more than 3 MB. How many images like this can you fit?
This is where we come to the rescue. Using our proprietary image analysis software and open-source encoding software optimized for optimal compression, we can reduce image size by up to 90%, with no differences visible to the human eye in most cases.
Story
Garage days
Garage days We started brave and ready to change the world - our first slogan was "Make the Web smaller". So we developed an online service and released it to the public in July 2014. It had a straightforward API, a system for managing processing queues, and several servers ready to work hard to crunch millions of images.
While developing an API to optimize the web was a noble endeavor, we soon realized that it was not a very actionable call for our potential customers who wanted to have their websites' images optimized with as little effort as possible. And coding calls to an API, even one as straightforward as ours, was not easy.
Thinking business
Minding the gap, we changed our battle cry to "Speed up your website" and started finding ways for our API to meet users' needs. The first way was a WordPress plugin we developed: the ShortPixel Image Optimization plugin, which uses our API and the power of our server cloud to optimize WordPress sites' images.
We released our first public beta version of the ShortPixel Image Optimization plugin in November 2014, and that was the launch of our image optimization service. We owe a huge "thank you" to many of our customers for their early days feedback which ranged from an iconic "Your f***ing plugin broke my site!" to details about their exact needs or heartwarming "Awesome plugin!" feed-back messages. All this has helped us greatly in tailoring our service to your needs, and it still does, because every opinion or request our customers send us counts. Occasionally it takes time until it hits the prime-time but it certainly will not be ignored.
We have also developed an online demo that allows you to check your web pages for unoptimized images and see how much you would gain with our service, Online Image Compression Tool.
Growing up
In April 2015, we rolled out our first paid version of the service. We started to have more and more customers using our ShortPixel Image Optimization plugin, so we had to scale on new and more powerful servers to cope with so many specific situations of customers with different WordPress installations, different plugins or custom code. We decided to offer the same premium support to all our customers, regardless of whether they are paying customers or use our free service.
In 2016, we developed a Client Library for PHP, and in 2017 we launched a generic PHP tool for optimizing website images, ShortPixel Website Optimizer, so that now any PHP-based website can benefit from our image compression technology. We have also developed a Command Line interface that allows our services to be used from command line to optimize local folders containing images, or in a scheduler job to monitor those image folders for changes without the need of any Administrator intervention. You can check all these out, and many more, on our Products page.
Stacking More Services
In 2018, we launched a new service, ShortPixel Adaptive Images. Building on the success of image optimization, started offering a new service that aims to provide images scaled as close as possible to the pixel size that is needed on each page and on each device, while also improving the delivery of the optimized images via CDN. Read more details on the ShortPixel Adaptive Images product page.
As of 2022
More than eight years later and after more than 9 billion optimized images for more than 500,000 customers, of which almost 400,000 are plugin users, we are glad to have started this journey, and we are still proudly doing it. On our ticketing system we have received more than 80,000 support messages so far and we made sure that every customer was swiftly helped. 24/7/365.
Compression Technology
Our service is based on a SAAS model that offers image compression through our API, which you can access either directly or through various tools that we have developed specifically for this purpose.
ShortPixel Architecture
Behind the API, our service is built in several layers as follows:
- A load balancer line-up consisting of an active load balancer and a backup load balancer designed to become active within seconds when needed, without requiring DNS changes. The load balancer also serves as a firewall.
- A redundant pair of web servers that receive the API calls and deliver the optimized files.
- The ShortPixel Balanced Processing Queue, which stores all optimization requests and ensures that all our customers get a fair processing time (customers with fewer images in the queue do not have to wait for customers with many simultaneous requests)
- The image processing farm of servers - these servers crunch the images using ShortPixel's powerful optimization algorithms and produce the optimized images.
- The File Storage that stores the optimized images on fast SSD disks until they are retrieved via our API.
- The Accounting and reporting database that contains information about our customers and image optimizations.
Future
First and most important, we intend to keep the same attention to you, our customers, and the feedback you give us, and let ourselves be guided by your needs. We are also committed to constantly improve the performance of the optimization algorithms we use so that we can provide you with the best possible compression/quality ratio.
Last but not least, we intend to keep our service easy to use yet flexible, adding more and more ways of using it, for your convenience and for your Happy Optimizing!
