Michelin has it all: Fast sites and reduced carbon footprint

Michelin manages over 250 websites across 40+ countries through a CMS platform. They develop widgets allowing authors in different countries to add content to the websites. The digital team needed to spot weaknesses and make improvements constantly, relying on monitoring and profiling tools to prioritize performance topics. The company also aimed to align performance with its All‑Sustainable strategy, seeking new indicators and solutions to address digital sobriety and energy efficiency goals.

Michelin implemented Quanta’s Real User Monitoring dashboard on Michelinman.com to preview the most‑visited pages and their related performance scores in terms of page load time and estimated carbon footprint. The tool identified that one of the most visited pages emitted 3.6 g of CO2 per view. Since the report showed that the main optimization was to reduce image size, Michelin utilized Scaleflex’s Cloudimage to compress, optimize, and deliver images via multi‑CDNs, with caching close to users and lazy‑loading to defer off‑screen images.

After implementing Cloudimage, Michelin’s webpages now weigh less than 1 gram of CO2 per view as seen on Quanta’s carbon monitoring tool. The initiative delivered a huge decrease in data transferred over the network, a faster user experience (improvements in LCP and total blocking time), and a four‑times reduction in the pages’ estimated carbon footprint. Images became 4.5× lighter with no impact on quality, and the implementation achieved results in under a week-demonstrating quick, meaningful gains for both performance and sustainability.