Optimize your images with the help of a CDN like Cloudinary

What's a CDN?

A CDN (Content delivery network) is used to deliver images to your users faster and more effectively. It takes care of hosting your images and several CND allows you to transform your images on demand, which is very useful for reducing the size of your images on phones. It's an excellent tool to increase the loading speed of your pages in different media, whether mobile, tablet, or computer!

Adaptive images?

It is now possible to return adaptive images to your users, this means that the images adapt to the screen size of the client. This can be very good for your page load times, but it also takes a lot of management to create each image. If for example, you want to manage images for 6 different resolutions, you will have to create 6 different images. The amount of image then multiplies for each image format you want to support (e.g. WebP). This is where a CDN such as Cloudinary comes into play. By hosting our images on Cloudinary, we can ask it to do the WebP transformations and let it manage the different sizes for us! We keep the simplicity of a single image while providing a faster experience for our users! It is also possible to transform your images, resize them, and add filters, all without even touching your original image!

Detections of the best format for each user

Another big advantage of using Cloudinary is that it detects itself according to the user's browser, and which image format is best depending on what the browser supports. For example, a WebP image could be 50% smaller than the original JPG you are using, if the client's browser allows it, it will return it to WebP, but if their browser is older and doesn't recognize WebP, no problem, everything will be returned in a supported format. With Cloudinary, everything is done automatically for the user and it increases the user experience!

Using a Content Delivery Network with a CMS?

It is certainly possible to use a CDN for your images with a CMS. This is exactly what is done for this site using Forestry. Several CMS support different CDNs, Cloudinary being one of the most popular in the field, it is often a popular option for a CMS. In Forestry's case, there were a few options, but Cloudinary was the easiest and worked well with my static site builder. Cloudinary also has a free plan which is perfect for getting started.

A good content delivery network with adaptive image management will make your site even faster. Knowing that images are often the primary cause of slowdown on a site, it is essential to manage them well. As a bonus, the loading time of your pages can influence your SEO on the web, so it's something we must take seriously! Do not hesitate to contact me if you have a project in mind, it will be my pleasure to help you!