There is a well documented correlation between page speed and user conversion. As part of the tech sprints, we have been looking at ways to speed cord up to deliver a better experience for both new and existing users.

As cord is image heavy, one of the biggest levers to improve page speed is by better optimising the images we show to users.

With this upgrade we now serve images in a new format known as WebP which is on average 30% smaller than traditional JPEGs or GIFs. For some large GIFs, the improvement is extremely significant. Our team page's GIFs used to be about ~2MB - the WebP versions are only ~0.8MB.As a result, images will now load quicker site-wide, and cord should load 10-20% faster for users.Additionally, we also fixed/improved a few related issues:

Kudos to Hasan (BE) and Vinu (FE) who worked on the BE and FE respectively. There were loads of different cases to account for and the team worked through them valiantly and meticulously. Thank you as well to Andres (FE) for the code reviews, and Anna (PO) and James (GM) for the product testing.

We’re wrapping up tech fortnight and moving onto solving the main usability issues and bugs that are affecting our users. Expect to see enhancements to how the calendar integration works (people & companies), and improvements to the hiding function (companies).