Becoming a huge online store with thousands of loyal customers is something a lot of Shopify businesses dream of. That was exactly AMARRA – an innovative women's fashion design house that started out as a small company with a goal to redefine the industry and now boasts over 640 thousand followers on social media.
The TinyIMG app has been a long-term companion of AMARRA’s journey. With convenient bulk metadata editing, broken link fixing, and automatic image optimization, TinyIMG takes care of the tedious work, leaving AMARRA to focus on its mission.
"With the help of TinyIMG, we were able to enhance our customer experience, reduce our bounce rate on the website, and boost overall loading times."
AMARRA
So, let’s take a look at how AMARRA got to where it is now. We’ll cover how exactly TinyIMG contributed to its SEO efforts and more.
At a glance:
- Shopify store name: AMARRA
- Website: https://amarra.com/
- Niche: Fashion
- Founded: 2018
- Mission: To redefine the fashion industry by continually providing the latest designs that enhance the beauty of the female form.
- TinyIMG contribution: Roughly 2.26GB saved and over 4,000 images optimized, resulting in improved page load times and saved storage.
The story behind AMARRA
AMARRA is a high-end fashion brand that creates luxurious dresses for every occasion with a strict focus on quality, cut, and an avant-garde design style.
The company was established in 2018 with the help of Abhi Madan – the Creative Director of AMARRA. The main goal from the very beginning was to create innovative designs.
However, as the company grew, AMARRA went even further and set out to revolutionize fashion and shake the industry with designs that never fail to enhance the beauty of the female form.
“We have something special and unique for every girl,” the company stated.
The company wanted to create a brand that would welcome all ladies. “A girl ready to step into womanhood at her quinceanera, a girl wanting to be crowned as the prom queen, a lady looking for a gorgeous dress for a formal event, or an outgoing lady ready to dance all night,” AMARRA stated.
One thing about AMARRA that makes it stand out from competition is that it puts a lot of focus on user experience. But it’s not just about the product pages or the homepage – it's about the little things, too.
For example, the company puts its customers first by implementing unique tools such as a body type calculator.
Users can use it to figure out their body shape, learn how to measure themselves, and easily find the right size thanks to the size chart option – AMARRA has thought of it all.
Through the storm to success
In terms of website building, AMARRA’s journey didn’t start from Shopify. They began exploring a variety of eCommerce platforms to find which one could best turn their vision into reality. However, none of them compared to Shopify, especially because of the template-building option, which completely changed the game and gave the store a consistent look and feel.
While Shopify had its strengths, it took quite some time for the business to kick-off.
“We certainly faced some challenges during our initial days. Competition was, of course, one of them,“ AMARRA said.
Having to learn how to stand out and ensure an exceptional online presence with media-forward pages wasn’t easy and took quite a lot of time and effort to figure out.
Images drastically reduced loading times, which negatively influenced user experience. Naturally, slower websites lead to increased bounce rates – the percentage of users who leave a website after visiting just one page.
According to research conducted by Pingdom in 2018, the bounce rate probability drastically increases with each passing second that a page doesn’t load. By the time the page load time reaches 5 seconds, bounce rates can rise to 38%.
Source: Pingdom
In a business like this, you have one chance to gain loyal visitors, and AMARRA couldn’t risk losing so many potential customers.
When nothing seemed to go according to plan, AMARRA set out to completely redo the whole website. “We also had to start from scratch to build not only our online presence but the brand itself,” they claimed.
But even with fresh pages, the same issues started coming up again and long-term success seemed to be turning into a distant reality.
That wasn’t until AMARRA started to shift their perspective and understood that “starting a new business is not about betting everything on one big score,” they stated. The company began experimenting and carefully planning the next steps on how to optimize its website.
It took a lot of learning from their own mistakes, putting in consistent effort, trying to find errors, and overcoming challenges to start seeing gradual progress.
When asked what was the biggest lesson AMARRA learned during this tough period, they replied “If you want to be successful in today’s digital era, you must provide a great user experience online.”
That’s when the company set out to search for tools that would help automate tedious and time-consuming tasks.
AMARRA and TinyIMG – where it all began
As a fashion design house that focuses on the detail and quality of its dresses, AMARRA treats its website with as much importance. That’s why SEO is an integral part of the company’s marketing strategy.
However, good SEO practices require compressed yet still high-quality images, exceptional load time to prevent bounce rates, maintaining the website to ensure there are no broken pages, and more.
And with a website that’s filled with thousands of product images, ensuring good website performance at all times can be a challenge.
That’s when TinyIMG came into the picture. For AMARRA, the automatic image optimization was the feature that sealed the deal.
The automatic image optimization success
“We did our research and found that TinyIMG’s auto-optimization, image compression, and quality control are some must-have tools that we could use,” they said.
AMARRA realized that TinyIMG can reduce images by almost three-quarters and still retain exceptional quality. And the best part – you can automate this process so that anytime you want to optimize images in bulk, you can do it with a click of a button.
AMARRA found this especially useful considering they had hundreds of pages with thousands of images that needed optimizing… and doing it one by one was just impossible. That’s how TinyIMG became a regular companion for the company.
“With the help of TinyIMG we were able to enhance our customer experience, reduce our bounce rate on the website, and boost overall loading times,” AMARRA said. Here is the company’s TinyIMG image optimization result dashboard:
With our app, AMARRA already optimized more than 4,000 images, resulting in over 2GB saved. But it didn’t just save resources – compressed images made pages lighter, which improved the page performance.
As we can see using the free TinyIMG extension for Chrome, the performance results of the company’s pages speak for themselves.
The Core Web Vitals results on AMARRA’s product pages are all marked green, meaning it has a quick load time, fast page responsiveness, and almost non-existent layout shifts. Overall, it passes the Core Web Vitals performance test, which Google considers vital for user experience.
Additionally, the performance score on Google PageSpeed Insights saw a huge improvement soon after extensive image optimizations, enabling lazy loading, and asset preloading with TinyIMG. Prior to it, the performance score was 48 on desktop, which is a low score that requires fixing.
However, after putting TinyIMG to work, AMARRA’s performance score skyrocketed to new levels, resulting in an 82-point score. That’s a 34% improvement on the desktop website. At the same time, on mobile devices, the performance of the same page was enhanced by 16%.
Here are some of the more specific metrics that improved after optimization:
- First Contentful Paint (time it takes for the first content piece to appear) – improved from 3 seconds to 1.8 seconds.
- Speed index (time it takes for above-the-fold content to be displayed) – improved from 2.3 seconds to 1.9 seconds.
More than just for image optimization
It didn’t take long for AMARRA to start using TinyIMG as more than just an image optimization app but rather a full-scale SEO tool.
For example, the company praised the app’s broken link fixing functionality. “TinyIMG also helped us remove those pesky 404 pages…”
Broken pages can leave site visitors frustrated, while search engines like Google may even start considering your website as lower quality, ruining the ranking you worked so hard to get.
AMARRA got ahead of the problem before any damage was done by turning on weekly TinyIMG broken link reports. This resulted in fixing 26 broken links already, as shown on the company’s TinyIMG result dashboard:
Additionally, the company leveraged TinyIMG’s metadata editor. “... We cannot stress enough on the life-saving feature of bulk editing,” the company added.
TinyIMG’s metadata editor helped the company save loads of time on adding meta titles and descriptions purely because it lets you edit the metadata of all pages in one place.
TinyIMG contribution summary
- Images optimized: 4352
- Space saved: 2.26GB
- Broken links detected and fixed: 26
- Performance score improved: from 48 to 82
- Loading time improved: from 3 seconds to 1.8 seconds
- Time saved: 217.7 hours
A must-have app for anyone who struggles with SEO
When asked what’s next for AMARRA, the company confidently stated that “... building customer loyalty is our top priority right now,” and their goal is to become one of the biggest names in the world of fashion.
AMARRA believes that TinyIMG can be a tool that helps lead companies like theirs to success. “We would definitely recommend TinyIMG to other merchants… if you are unable to achieve the desired results, never hesitate to approach professionals like TinyIMG. Just like we understand fashion, TinyIMG understands online presence.
Frequently asked questions
TinyIMG is a comprehensive Shopify app for image optimization, improving SEO and content, and enhancing your website’s speed. Compress images in a click of a button, enable asset preloading and lazy loading, set up JSON-LD without coding, optimize metadata in bulk, and more with one app.
You can install TinyIMG and use up to 50 monthly optimizations as well as alt text and filename optimization for free. If you want extra features, like image resizing, easy JSON-LD setup, one-click lazy loading or asset preloading, and more – the prices of TinyIMG start from $14/month.
TinyIMG has loads of beneficial features for SEO to make your work easier. You can start from running a site audit which will tell you exact SEO issues with specific pages. Additionally, you can automatically compress images to save valuable memory space, fix broken links, enable lazy loading which renders page content only when the user needs it, hide pages from search engines, and more.
