{"id":22310,"date":"2021-03-24T13:51:07","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T20:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/confronting_the_urgent_problem_of_web_performance"},"modified":"2026-05-07T08:00:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T15:00:54","slug":"confronting_the_urgent_problem_of_web_performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/confronting_the_urgent_problem_of_web_performance","title":{"rendered":"Confronting the Urgent Problem of Web Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a technology company, Cloudinary owes its success to its ability to build solutions that address the most critical challenges you, our customers, face. The companies we serve run the gamut of digital businesses\u2014retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality\u2014which, coincidentally, all care about the same things.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a look at those shared digital-business imperatives, which are at the forefront of our minds as we innovate:<\/p>\n

\"Business<\/p>\n

We\u2019re passionate about how users interact with and respond to the online worlds they visit. The visual experience has a tremendous effect on e-businesses, and your site\u2019s web performance can hinder any progress made toward the business-critical goals illustrated above. Hence why we are thrilled about Cloudinary\u2019s newest product offering, Media Optimizer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The launch kicked off last Tuesday, March 16, with a one-hour webinar titled Bet Your Luck on Web Performance<\/em><\/a>. Performance-engineering fellow Tim Kadlec<\/a> and I discussed what websites becoming more image- and video-centric means for site performance and SEO rankings. From there, I drilled down to the nuts and bolts of Media Optimizer with a product overview.<\/p>\n

Below are the high-level takeaways.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsers have come to expect richer, more immersive experiences. When it comes to e-commerce or publishing, that means more media.\u201d<\/h2>\n

Modern websites and apps are increasingly more visual. Hero images, graphics, product photos, videos<\/a>\u2014all of them tell a compelling story in a way that the written word cannot. However, just as powerful as they are for communicating, the sum of visual media can work to the detriment of web performance. And, unfortunately, slower websites lead to lower revenue. A study from Walmart found that for every second of improvement in load time, the retailer saw a 2% increase in conversions; even improvements as small as 100 milliseconds lead to measurable 1% increases in revenue.<\/p>\n

Tim pointed to HTTP Archive\u2019s Web Almanac<\/a>, which found that for the heaviest pages, or the 90th percentile of the web, images comprise almost 75% of their total weight. \u201cEven at the median, images dwarf the combination of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML in terms of sheer weight,\u201d Tim said, adding that images are expensive on the network, and there\u2019s also memory impact. Furthermore, he acknowledged that there\u2019s a lot of talk today around JavaScript\u2019s performance implications: \u201cJavaScript has some unique characteristics that can wreak havoc, but images don\u2019t get a free pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYour SEO ranking is now at stake \u2026 and so is your reputation.\u201d<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve long known that Google factors performance into SEO, but it was always pretty ambiguous. The search-engine giant is now abundantly transparent, having announced exactly which metrics it\u2019ll be evaluating. Enter Core Web Vitals<\/a> (CWVs), the new search signals everyone is scrambling to optimize for. The three metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Display (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which will take effect in June 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of organizations put focus on CWVs right now because SEO ranking and the resulting traffic is a massive component of business success,\u201d Tim said. He went on to talk about the effect CWVs will have on brand reputation down the road, especially as Google takes incremental steps to publicly label sites as being historically fast or slow. \u201cI fully expect that at some point, Google is going to be using this Chrome user-experience data to give very notable flags showing up right inside of search-engine results \u2026 your reputation is going to be on the line based on whether you\u2019re hitting these metrics,\u201d he observed.<\/p>\n

Clearly, there\u2019s work to be done in response to Google\u2019s guidance. As evidence, currently 47% of websites have a LCP score of greater than 2.5 seconds, which means that nearly half of all websites fall into the \u201cNeeds Improvement\u201d or \u201cPoor\u201d buckets. When a website meets Google\u2019s CWV thresholds for all three metrics, visitors on e-commerce sites are 25% less likely to abandon the page. So, let\u2019s optimize!<\/p>\n

\u201cSay hello to Cloudinary\u2019s Media Optimizer.\u201d<\/h2>\n

We\u2019d love to walk you through a more thorough demo on Cloudinary\u2019s Media Optimizer at your request<\/a>, but let me summarize the presentation I gave during last Tuesday\u2019s webinar.<\/p>\n

Media Optimizer<\/a> sits between the end users of your website or app and your media storage, as in the graphic below, with three key capabilities or modes of operation:<\/p>\n