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.

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.

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.

[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.

I’m not going to lie, Progressive Web App (or PWA) have become a bit of a buzzword, with many developers singing its virtues and proclaiming that it solves all of their problems. Progressive Web Apps aren’t going to cure cancer or make you a billionaire on their own. But they can make your Web Apps a lot more approachable and performant.

And so the song goes, well, more or less.

There really are an abundance of content delivery networks (CDNs) out there; and a time and a place in which each of those CDN services could win the race for fastest, most reliable, or best fit for for your resources. But somehow, you have to choose one, right?

As the number of images and videos on a website continue to grow, slower load times and thus a negative user experience are both growing concerns for any company.  An article this summer in The Fiscal Times, citing Internet data measurement company HTTP Archive, noted that the average website is now 2.1 MB in size, compared to 1.5 MB two years ago. And one of the biggest reasons for this growth is the addition of content such as videos and engaging images designed to drive more traffic to the site.