Cloudinary Blog

This week at the #PerfMatters Conference, we learned about the importance of performance measurement and new standards like Server-Timing that is available in Chrome 65, Opera and soon Firefox.

At Cloudinary we are committed to transparency and accountability. That’s why I’m really excited to announce that we now support Server-Timing for all our customers! Today, Server-Timing is available on-demand, but in the near future we will enable this broadly - enabling greater insights with your RUM solutions.

In this part, I'll show you how to implement our new responsive images solution, which enables you to optimize the image you deliver based on the requesting device's resolution and the available dimensions. This new feature can help you to simplify the many complexities of creating multiple variants of every media assets, with on-the-fly manipulation and fast delivery through the CDN.

To create a profile, Hinge users initially had to connect their Facebook and/or Instagram accounts to the app, which would import images to the users’ Hinge profiles. Hinge stored those images with a URL that expired after two months, unless the user logged into the app regularly. This aspect of the app was frustrating for users because the photos would become inaccessible for others to view.

Since the Internet boom over a decade ago, the number of new startups established globally has grown consistently. Every year an estimated 1.35 million new tech startups are formed by enthusiastic entrepreneurs, who follow their dreams to build a sustainable and successful business.

TL;DR

I both love and hate animated Gifs.

Safari Tech Preview has changed all of this. Now I love and love animated “Gifs”.

Animated Gifs are a hack. To quote from the original Gif89a specification:

Welcome to the latest edition of the Responsive Images Guide!

In part 1, I laid out the big idea: a responsive image is a variable image – which adjusts itself to fit variable contexts.

In part 2, we looked at the most common way that an image can do exactly that: scaling itself up and down to fit viewports of different sizes and screens with different densities.

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:

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.