Case Study: Hydrow improves Core Web Vitals by 75% with Cloudinary
Key results
The challenge
Hydrow managed visual content across separate WordPress and Shopify systems that were not centrally governed. Iterating on marketing treatments took weeks and required developer support, and poor front-end Core Web Vitals affected search performance and user experience.
The solution
Hydrow adopted Cloudinary as a single source of truth for visual assets, integrated with Contentful, Next.js, and Shopify. Adaptive bitrate streaming and automated image management were used to optimize delivery.
“For visual asset management, if you need to optimize front-end performance, Cloudinary is the best way to fire and forget.”
RKReuben KabelSVP of Engineering, Hydrow
The results, in context
Cloudinary moved Hydrow's Core Web Vitals from the bottom to the top quartile, a 75% improvement, and reduced time-to-market for highly visual product pages from weeks to minutes. Videos play buffer-free across bandwidth conditions via adaptive bitrate streaming.