Case Study: Qiita achieves faster-loading, higher-quality images with imgix

Leveraging the imgix CDN & SDKs, Qiita transformed their user experience by delivering faster-loading, higher-quality graphics

Qiita, one of Japan’s largest developer knowledge exchanges, was struggling to deliver optimized images at scale on its Ruby on Rails and React platform. Its previous CDN setup with AWS CloudFront, Lambda@Edge, and Camo couldn’t efficiently handle large files or provide fast, well-sized images, leading to slow page loads, poor image quality, and lower cache hit rates, SEO rankings, and conversions. Qiita turned to imgix, using the imgix CDN and imgix-rb Ruby SDK to solve these image delivery challenges.

With imgix, Qiita moved source images to Amazon S3 and used imgix’s URL-based rendering and transformation features to automate resizing, compression, format selection, and responsive delivery. The result was a much faster, higher-quality experience: a 23MB image’s load time dropped from 40.67 seconds to 3.51 seconds, WebP images could be served in 200–300 ms, and cache-miss response times improved 5x from 1000 ms to 200 ms. Overall, imgix helped Qiita improve load times by 91% and reduce developer effort on backend image handling.

Qiita

Toshifumi Kiyono

Product Development Manager