How do I deliver the most optimized assets?

Optimizing assets for delivery means reducing the file size of the assets to ensure fast delivery to your end users. You can reduce the file size by:

• Delivering assets at the dimensions at which they need to be displayed
• Choosing the best format for each asset according to the user's browser
• Compressing or encoding the asset enough to reduce the file size without impacting the visual quality

When not applying any transformation, Cloudinary delivers the asset as is (unoptimized). If you apply any transformation to your assets (e.g. width, height, etc), Cloudinary automatically applies certain default image optimizations and default video optimizations.

You can apply transformations to your delivery URLs to optimize the format and quality of your delivered assets automatically. You can also employ responsive image resizing to deliver the most appropriate image size for the user's viewing device, or specifically set dimensions to resize or crop your images and videos.

Start by looking at the best practices for image and video optimization, and learn more in our dedicated guides for image optimization, video optimization and audio optimization.