Case Study: Upworthy achieves up to 50% more Active Visits and faster image load times with imgix

After turning imgix on, Upworthy saw its daily active visits spike by as much as 50 percent

Upworthy is a fast‑growing digital publisher known for viral, socially driven stories and runs its site with a small engineering team of six. The team found that poorly formatted images—sometimes accounting for up to 70% of a page’s weight—were a major cause of slow pages and editorial friction, because image optimization was manual, inconsistent, and hard to correct once bad versions were published.

Upworthy implemented imgix, an on‑demand image processor with caching that sits at the end of the delivery stack, requiring minimal integration and maintenance. The change let the team standardize imagery, cut page load times, and free engineers from manual image workflows; as a result, Active Visits rose by as much as 50% with only modest tuning.

Upworthy

Josh French

Upworthy