- Industry
- SaaS, CMS
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- Indianapolis, IN, USA
- Website
- zephyrcms.com
- Reduction in image-related support tickets
- 50–75%
- Faster page load times
- Up to 2×
- Average CMS page render time
- <100 ms
Image manipulations are among our most-used features. They enforce best practices and make everything load much faster on mobile.
Sam McKinneyDirector of Agency Services
Executive summary
Zephyr is a cloud-based CMS built specifically for web design and marketing agencies. In a crowded CMS market, speed and deployment efficiency became its primary differentiators.
By introducing Uploadcare for image uploads, resizing, and delivery, Zephyr built performance best practices directly into the platform. The result was dramatically faster page loads, significantly fewer support tickets, and a product that agencies could confidently sell to their own clients.
The challenge: winning on performance in a crowded CMS market
The CMS market is highly competitive, ranging from open-source tools to enterprise platforms. Built specifically for web design and marketing agencies, Zephyr chose to compete on speed and deployment efficiency rather than feature volume. To deliver on that promise, every agency-built website needed to load quickly and follow modern performance standards.
Images were the biggest challenge. Agencies often uploaded oversized or improperly formatted files, slowing down pages and breaking layouts. Early infrastructure relying on separate buckets and CDNs proved difficult to scale, and image-related mistakes accounted for a large share of support requests.
The solution
Uploadcare became the centralized layer for file uploads, image transformations, and CDN delivery within Zephyr’s microservices architecture. Instead of expecting agencies to manually resize and optimize images, resizing, compression, and format adjustments could be applied dynamically.
All media assets are now routed through Uploadcare projects linked to client websites, ensuring consistent handling and performance across the platform.
How Uploadcare helped
Image optimization moved from user responsibility into the core infrastructure of the CMS.
- Consistent image optimization by default: Uploaded images are resized, compressed, and formatted automatically, reducing the risk of oversized assets slowing down websites.
- Responsive delivery across devices: Images are adjusted dynamically based on device size, improving mobile load times without additional effort from agencies.
- Reduced support friction: Guardrails around image handling prevent common layout and performance issues before they reach support.
- Integrated CDN-backed delivery: Distributed delivery ensures consistent speed and reliability across all client websites.
We wanted something that could look at the device requesting the page and resize assets accordingly. This way, we get the absolute best speed possible.
The results
Image-related performance issues dropped significantly, and Zephyr strengthened its position as a speed-focused CMS.
- Significantly lower support overhead: Image-related issues dropped by 50–75%, freeing both Zephyr and its agency customers from troubleshooting layout breaks and slow-loading pages.
- Faster websites as a built-in advantage: Page weight was reduced dramatically, delivering up to 2x faster load times, especially on mobile devices where performance is most critical.
- Speed as a market differentiator: With average page render times under 100 milliseconds, Zephyr positioned itself as a performance-first CMS in a crowded market.
Since we don’t have to build the features Uploadcare delivers, we can roll out new features faster. The same goes for our clients — they can focus on strategy instead of resizing images.