How Cube Boosted Google Rankings with Uploadcare

Cube, the semantic layer for building consistent and high-performing AI and data applications, provides teams with a centralized source of truth for their data. Data engineers and application developers use Cube to access data in upstream data sources, organize it into consistent metrics, and deliver them to any application via Cube APIs.

As a Series A startup, Cube heavily invests in content marketing. The team regularly publishes on their blog, launches marketing landing pages, and creates numerous auto-generated pages using programmatic SEO techniques.

Historically, Cube had a predominantly technical team. However, as Cube experienced significant growth in 2022, non-technical team members such as marketing and product managers led to a challenge. To execute marketing campaigns and deliver on marketing goals, they needed user-friendly and time-saving publishing tools as an alternative to directly pushing Markdown and text files to GitHub repositories. Eventually, Cube decided to migrate its websites to a headless CMS—Contentful.

Simultaneously, Core Web Vitals of Cube's web resources didn't meet the requirements for better search engine rankings regarding performance, accessibility, and other metrics.

As a result, Cube’s growth engineering team embarked on a complete overhaul of the web infrastructure. Following the recommendations of Google Lighthouse and Semrush, the developers meticulously addressed issues such as slow loading times, poor server responses, and caching deficiencies.

Concurrently, they sought to implement a headless CMS, relying on Contentful's built-in CDN to optimize images, videos, and other media assets. Unfortunately, Contentful lacked the necessary advanced media manipulation capabilities. The Cube team needed various features like resizing, cropping, compression, and format conversion. With Contentful's built-in CDN, developers had been still required additional effort and infrastructure to adjust images based on various factors like device screen size, bandwidth, or user preferences. Thus, the engineers began exploring the market for a better media management solution to avoid manual media preprocessing.

Anastasiia Kataeva, then leader of the growth engineering team, explains that Cube had three primary requirements:

Cube aimed to bridge the gap between content creation and image uploading. They needed a fast way to obtain media links, preferably integrated directly within Contentful.

Optimizing media was vital to improving page load speed and earning higher rankings from search engines. As Cube's marketing content has a lot of illustrations, they used to handle the same asset in various sizes and scales across different sections of the website and users' devices.

Cube needed to go fast, so they sought a solution to store assets on readily available, managed service and not build in-house infrastructure. At that time, Cube stored files using Amazon S3 and directly in GitHub repositories.

To make an informed choice, Cube's engineers rigorously tested various third-party providers. Uploadcare emerged as the clear winner, demonstrating a convenient and powerful API, on-the-fly media processing, and simplicity of implementation.

Today, Uploadcare serves as an indispensable tool for Cube's marketing websites.

Cube's engineers initially developed a simple single-page application (SPA) featuring an upload form protected by Google authentication. It empowered the team to run Uploadcare ad-hoc and enabled anyone within the team to independently upload files and retrieve their links without relying on engineering assistance.

Cube custom-built the Contentful extension from scratch. This extension facilitated the direct upload of images from the content editor, significantly speeding up the creation of new publications. Additionally, it allowed simultaneous previewing of materials and sharing them with the team.

Having created marketing materials for years, Cube desired to leverage Uploadcare for uploading all new assets. However, they also needed to support and optimize images from other sources. Thanks to Uploadcare's proxy feature, Cube effortlessly obtained appropriately sized and scaled images, regardless of where they were stored.

The complete migration to Uploadcare played a pivotal role in improving resource load times and enhancing website performance. As a result, Cube regained its rankings and witnessed increased visibility on Google's search results page.

Cube revolutionized the workflow within its marketing team, empowering non-technical individuals to publish materials with ease. With file uploading made effortless, content creators and designers began collaborating directly, while developers saved valuable time.

Uploadcare is an end-to-end cloud platform providing a next-gen file-handling infrastructure. It can cover any part of the media pipeline or all of them at once: