Case Study: Hipcamp (outdoor travel marketplace) achieves half-second page loads and streamlined image optimization with Cloudinary

Hipcamp Heads Outdoors to Optimize Images, Improve Page Load Time With Cloudinary

Hipcamp, a San Francisco–based outdoor/travel marketplace that helps people discover and book campsites, relies on high‑quality photography to showcase listings across desktop, tablet, and mobile. With photos coming from hosts, campers, and professional shoots, Hipcamp faced the challenge of thousands of images in varying formats and sizes and a small engineering team having to manually crop, resize and produce multiple versions to maintain a consistent site look and fast performance.

By adopting Cloudinary’s upload widget, JS plugin and CarrierWave integration, Hipcamp automated uploads, responsive cropping, format selection (f_auto), and quality optimization (q_auto), plus auto‑tagging for SEO‑friendly filenames. The result: consistent image presentation across viewports, support for WebP, hundreds of developer hours saved, faster time to market, improved image SEO and a reported ~0.5 second desktop page load time.

Hipcamp

Pierre Alvan

Senior Software Engineer