Cloudinary Blog

[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.