Part of what draws us to retail stores is their ability to connect to our senses: sight, touch, hearing, and smell. Connections that extend beyond products include decor and store employees. When transforming the experience into online shopping, these natural senses are substituted with a sense of the virtual experience.

We’re thrilled to be sharing our enhanced WordPress Plugin for seamless image and video management with the world today. Available for free to all WordPress users here, the new plugin will help the millions of users relying on the popular CMS more easily create visual-rich websites, while cutting their content publishing times in half. You can learn more about key integration features in today’s announcement.

WordPress powers 34% of the internet and represents 60% of all CMS-built sites. From small blogs to large enterprise websites, WordPress is a popular choice for publishers and companies of all kinds. Media management within WordPress is an important component and one that, when done right, can significantly boost user engagement and overall site performance.

When was the last time you bought a product without looking at its images or videos? The chance of customers buying a product increases by an order of magnitude when you effectively showcase your brand and products with images and videos. And when you have customers interacting with your brand across different channels and devices, you must meet them everywhere as they go from discovery to purchase.

Register here and join us Tuesday, February 25.
Topics covered will include:
Bleacher Report is one of many notable brands leveraging Cloudinary’s dynamic video platform to attract and retain audiences through visual storytelling. With nearly 90 percent of consumers relying on videos to help them make purchase decisions and video-filled homepages registering 80 percent higher conversion rates than text-only sites, this webinar will pinpoint a course of action for overcoming perceived barriers to video, such as high production costs and technological challenges.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have the powers of Gatsby rendering performant pages and serving optimized and transformed media files from Cloudinary on the same site? That’s now a reality: I’m excited to introduce two Gatsby plugins on Cloudinary: Gatsby-Source-Cloudinary and Gatsby-Transformer-Cloudinary.

Increasingly, companies large and small, across all industries are enhancing their customer and brand experiences through video. We’ve just launched our dynamic video platform and shared our thoughts on the differences between traditional online video platforms (OVPs) and dynamic ones when it comes to creating, managing, and delivering compelling and engaging videos.

Online video platforms (OVPs) first launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s with a similar promise to the once-iconic automobile brand: “Not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. However, as OVPs evolved, partly to address our insatiable appetite for video, they became more and more complex. Tools for every step of the video-delivery process—from ingestion to storage to encoding, and so forth—came with their own set of shiny knobs and dials. Configurations and procedures for even trivial tasks required a study of user manuals, causing disenchantment, stress, and aversion all around. Cloudinary is excited to be launching new, game-changing video-management capabilities today to tackle that challenge.

Videos make websites more engaging and lively, promising audience “stickiness” and return visits. However, research studies show that slow startup or playback stalls of videos often leads to visitor loss. In fact, Akamai found that after a two-second delay, each additional second of stalling could cost you a 6-percent depletion of audience.

On social media, videos posted by users constitute a significant amount of the content appeal on those platforms. From upload to manipulation to delivery, a smooth, efficient, and effective pipeline for the posting process is mandatory to ensure consistent user sessions and their steadily increasing volume. However, building such an infrastructure is a complex, labor-intensive, and problem-prone undertaking.