BigCommerce announced that it has chosen Akamai to provide Akamai Image Manager to its 55,000+ BigCommerce stores around the world. As part of the agreement, BigCommerce customers will immediately gain access to Akamai’s automated image optimization technology. According to data from Akamai, a two-second delay in web page load time increases bounce rates by 103% and 53% of mobile shoppers will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load. With Akamai Image Manager, BigCommerce merchants will have the ability to optimize each online image for device type, image quality and download size, resulting in faster page load times, an engaging customer experience and improved website conversion. BigCommerce merchants using Akamai Image Manager as part of a closed beta saw as much as 70% improvement in site load times. Additional benefits to merchants include: Automatic image conversion. Detect and instantly convert online images to software-specific image formats to capitalize on advanced levels of compression provided through WebP, JPEG-XR and JPEG 2000 native to popular operating systems and browsers. Intelligent image delivery across devices. Automatically deliver resized, mobile-optimized images to mobile shoppers, reducing large files that slow site performance and significantly decreasing the amount of time spent personalizing image variants. Faster page load speeds. Using Akamai’s perceptual quality algorithm, Image Manager lightens the weight of digital images while maintaining the improved gains in performance, especially when viewing sites from a mobile device. Additionally, better performance leads to higher mobile usage and increased conversion rates.