I've been working to create a new image format, which I'm calling FUIF, or Free Universal Image Format. That’s a rather pretentious name, I know. But I couldn’t call it the Free Lossy Image Format (FLIF) because that acronym is not available any more (see below) and FUIF can do lossless, too, so it wouldn’t be accurate either.

If you run a Google search on LQIP you’ll see very few relevant articles, very little guidance, and definitely no Wikipedia articles. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the feedback on LQIP we have gathered from the community and suggest and open for conversation a few approaches based on the built-in capabilities of the Cloudinary service. Specifically, we’ll explain what LQIP are, where they are best used, and how you can leverage them to accelerate page loads and optimize user experience.

[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.

In the world of web design, what you don’t see can hurt you. Worse, it can damage your brand reputation, bottom line, or both.
Specifically I’m talking about images. Images can consume a lot of bandwidth (upwards of 70% of it for some sites). You get charged to send them. Your users are are charged to view them. In fact, you’re both probably getting charged for images that are never seen because website visitors never scroll down far enough to view them.