Shoplazza: boosting imgproxy for half a million websites

Shoplazza, a global eCommerce SaaS platform, prioritizes having an inviting environment for developers to work, and a simple, yet cutting-edge platform for merchants to sell …and they also process around 2 million images every day. With that last point in mind, they needed an image processing tool in the same orbit: simple, robust, and productive. That’s imgproxy! And while they originally used our open source version, they’re now reaping the benefits of Enterprise Pro. Here’s the full story.

The Toronto-based Shoplazza provides a simple website builder for eCommerce businesses of all shapes and sizes. Merchants are empowered with a powerful tool to create their online presence and to sell, promote, and run their business ideas online — all from a single place.

Shoplazza hosts nearly 500,000 websites and processes around 2 million images per day. Originally, its most pressing needs were image resizing and compression. For a long time, the team was using another image processing tool, ImageMagick, but over the course of the years, it proved lacking in the stability they needed.

So, Shoplazza switched to the open source version of imgproxy and found the stability they needed: processing all the images from half a million websites with no memory leaks or unexpected crashes while simultaneously consuming fewer resources than the previous solution. Beyond stability, the second benefit they highlight is imgproxy’s speed: it allows for the processing of most images in less than 100ms, so the team can resize and compress them on the fly. And the tool’s compatibility with all image formats was a plus, too.

Additionally, since imgproxy runs inside their K8S infrastructure, they needed the tool’s Docker image to be as small as possible, and imgproxy easily rose to the challenge.

After testing and running the OSS version on production for a while, Shoplazza estimated their loads and requirements and switched to imgproxy Pro (a typical path for vendors supporting startups, as we described in a recent article) and opted for the Enterprise plan since it allowed unlimited simultaneous image processing for 2 million of images and provided advanced features).

imgproxy has many features and configurations, all of which are easy to understand and adjust. We could leverage WebP in all our hosted websites in just one day.

Bing, CTO, Shoplazza

Whether you’re interested in the Enterprise version or want to try our simpler plan first, feel free to drop us a line so we can help you optimize your image processing, on the fly and at full capacity!