Cloudinary Blog

TL;DR

Since Google shared their intent for the next billion internet users, some African developers thought this was pointing right at them and they needed to act fast. The mission to bring the next billion users from Africa to the internet kicked off a storm of enthusiasm. This community event turned into a success story and this is a summary of what happened.

TL;DR In our last article, we saw how Cloudinary is the perfect email image hosting solution for launching email marketing campaigns at scale. Today, we’ll explore this topic further, looking at how Cloudinary can create dynamic image banners that can be used to create highly personalized email marketing campaigns.

Facebook recently made an announcement that every person in digital marketing should pay attention to: The faster your website loads, the more likely it is to show up in Facebook’s news feeds. (News Feed FYI: Showing You Stories That Link to Faster Loading Webpages )

tl;dr

Cloudinary is a powerful image hosting solution for email marketing campaigns of any size. With features such as advanced image optimization and on-the-fly image transformation, backed by a global CDN, Cloudinary provides the base for a seamless user experience in your email campaigns leading to increased conversion and performance.

As a developer, it seems inefficient to serve a 2000kb JPEG image when we could compress images to optimize the performance without degrading the visual quality.

We are not new to this kind of responsibility. But our productivity will end up being questioned if we do not deliver fast. In order to do so, the community has devised several patterns to help improve productivity. Let's review few of these patterns based on their categories:

Images and video are a core component of websites, mobile apps and our digital life. They deliver exciting content and improve the user experience by delivering the best format, size and quality to meet each web visitor’s unique needs

WordPress is the number one content management system (CMS) in use today, running approximately 27 percent of the entire internet. Several high-traffic websites run on WordPress, and many utilize media, such as images and videos, to attract users and meet their needs.

Because images dominate page weight, methodical image optimization can have a significant effect on conversions and user experience. And the performance tools you choose to use can have a powerful impact on how websites are built and maintained. One such popular open source tool is WebPagetest. It is designed to measure and analyze webpage performance, which is why Cloudinary chose to partner with our friends over there to launch Website Speed Test.

You might have read some tutorials or articles explaining the importance of images and how to optimize them to deliver a great experience to your users. But does this work really translate into wins for your company? In this talk, you see real-world examples of the positive impact that image optimizations can have on metrics that your bosses and clients care about. You will walk away from this talk with compelling data and useful tools to help you get buy-in and support for this important user experience work at your company.

[Author's Note:] This article is inspired by the work of José Manuel Pérez. A lot of the information presented here appeared, in one form or another, in a talk Perez gave at Render 2017 in Oxford, England. If this article inspires you, check out his original talk.