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.
Hinge, the relationship app, is taking a different approach to online dating. Instead of encouraging casual dating, the Hinge app is designed to help individuals build meaningful relationships. With Hinge, users can upload both photos and short videos intended to help them strikeup two-way conversations that foster stronger connections and turn virtual connections into real romance.
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.
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.