Did you know that humans process imagery 60,000 times faster than text? In fact, 90% of the information our brains process is visual, which makes it seem a no-brainer—pun intended—that brands are connecting with consumers through visual content online. However, adding media assets like images and videos to websites comes with a tradeoff: the more media, the heavier the site, which results in a noticeable slowdown in page loads and a reduction in content quality.
For Stylight, a leading online search platform for fashion, beauty and design, uptime, performance, and customer experience greatly affect the bottom line. Available in 16 markets, the platform is visited every year by 120 million users who can search through 1,500 shops to find the best deals. Once they find their favorite product, they are redirected to one of Stylight’s partner shops where they can proceed with their purchase transaction.
Optimized media assets have always been essential to website performance. To help developers measure, understand and improve website performance, Google created Core Web Vitals, a subset of Web Vitals that focuses on three aspects of the user experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. In June 2021, Google plans to make page experience a ranking factor—so Core Web Vitals and media asset optimization will become even more important.
To engage with modern users, today’s websites must be extremely visual. Even though high-quality images and videos can help keep visitors on the site and convert them, 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.
Is your web page speed a pitfall or a profit driver? If you don’t stay on top of optimizing rich media on your website, chances are your web performance is actively (and financially) working against you.
Images take up over 60% of modern websites’ total bandwidth. In the case of cutting-edge, image-rich designs, such as those for social media like Pinterest, that number is, remarkably, over 85%.
Bandwidth is a costly commodity that gobbles up most of the IT budget of high-traffic sites, easily surpassing hosting and storage costs. In addition, because the sheer volume of traffic takes time to consume, your visitors often spend a lot of time waiting for images to load.
Given the astronomical IT outlay, visitor abandonment due to lengthy load times, and the subsequent reduction in conversion rate and revenue, do make it a high priority to optimize your websites images and speed up their delivery.
Delivering video files to users can be a much more complex undertaking than many people stop to consider. There are a large variety of video formats and codecs to choose between, and various optimization parameters for encoding the videos. Parameters such as bitrate, key-frame-interval, and frame-rate will have an effect on the visual quality and bandwidth requirements when delivering the video file. To make matters worse, there are so many potential viewing devices out there (desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, etc). Each of these devices have different browsers or apps, and they all support different formats and codecs!
If you're like most consumers today, you engage more with pictures or videos on a website than text. The stats don't lie - four times as many visitors would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, and sites with compelling images average twice as many views as text-heavy ones.
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.