To effectively engage with today’s digital audience, websites must be extremely visual. Even though high-quality images and videos play a key role in attracting and retaining visitors, those media assets also add to the page weight, load time, and bandwidth. Unoptimized content can result in performance issues, causing visitors to bounce off.
“Unoptimized images are often the greatest contributor to page bloat. Looking at the 90th percentile of the distribution of page weight, images account for a whopping 5.2 MB of a roughly 7-MB page. In other words, images comprise almost 75% of the total page weight.” — Web Almanac 2019 by HTTP Archive
In fact, if the page-load time increases from just one second to three, the probability that a user would bounce rises by 32%. And no wonder—because internet users, now armed with state-of-the-art devices that run on 5G networks, expect a fast and robust web or app experience. Not one or the other, but both: speed and quality.
As if sky-high user expectations weren’t enough of a tough challenge, Google announced late last year that it would start using its Core Web Vitals in June 2021 to set search rankings. For online businesses, that means that a slow or poor web experience can directly impact organic traffic, revenue, and profitability. Hence the urgent question: How should businesses optimize media and load pages fast?
Well, there’s a way you can have it all: high-performance visuals, superb user experience, and heartening SEO results.
Meet Cloudinary Media Optimizer
With its recent launch of Media Optimizer for both self-service and enterprise users, Cloudinary eliminates the compression-versus-quality tussle right off the bat by delivering small files coupled with high visual fidelity. Plus, businesses no longer need to manually create format, quality, or size variants; or write URL parameters. You can simply offload all the standard transformation tasks for images and videos to Media Optimizer, freeing up your teams to focus on advanced media editing, personalizations, and compelling user experience.
To get started on Media Optimizer, just perform two simple steps:
Once set up, Media Optimizer functions completely automatically and autonomously to deliver fully optimized assets on demand with zero manual intervention. Its dashboard and reports tell you how your assets are being optimized, what file-size savings you are garnering, and where you can optimize assets further.
To learn how Media Optimizer does all that magic all on its own, check out Caroline Levison’s blog post. The sections below describe what happens when you start using Media Optimizer.
Improve Your Website and App Performance
Studies indicate that as many as 40% of visitors would abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If your site hosts numerous images and videos, Media Optimizer’s automatic capability of optimizing format and quality significantly reduces file sizes while maintaining visual fidelity. Subsequently, your pages load faster and you deliver an engaging end-user experience.
The result: less bounces, more page visits, more products added to the cart, and rising sales.
Score Well on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
According to the HTTP Archive, more than 47% of desktop websites must improve their LCP. In all likelihood, the largest content in your visitor’s viewport is an image. Cloudinary’s media science is the foundation of the world’s leading solution for intelligent optimization of images. With advanced optimization techniques, multi-content delivery network (CDN) delivery, caching of optimized assets, and advanced file formats like AVIF, Cloudinary helps companies reduce their LCP to below 2.5 seconds.
The result: higher search rankings, reduced reliance on paid traffic, and growth in profits.
Deliver Reliably at Scale
A study by Backlinko found that the average site took 10.3 seconds to load. Cloudinary leverages the world’s top three CDN vendors to ensure a fast and reliable experience for visitors worldwide. In case of network issues, Cloudinary automatically switches over and selects the fastest route for your assets. Additionally, you can store originals and optimized assets in the cache at the edge, further expediting serving of high-demand images like hero images.
The result: high reliability and speeds, improved user experience, and high NPS scores.
Optimize Image and Videos on One Platform
Video consumption is rapidly increasing and is expected to be 15 times higher in 2022 than in 2017. As a result, online businesses must ramp up their videos without slowing down page loads, for which video optimization is absolutely paramount. Not only does Media Optimizer automatically optimize images and videos on the fly, including footage of thumbnail previews, it also supports the best and most modern video formats and codecs.
The result: faster page loads, higher video engagement, and more visitor conversions.
For more details on Media Optimizer, see the following:
- Media Optimizer
- Documentation
- Technical blog
- Bet Your Luck on Performance, a webinar hosted by web-performance guru Tim Kadlec and Cloudinary technology expert Yaron Reichert
- Web Performance: Trends and Insights from Four Top Performance Experts