tl;dr;
Cloudinary conducted a workshop at React Summit 2021 to highlight the effect of media performance on websites by correlating it with Google’s Core Web Vitals and other performance measurements. Also presented were typical optimization techniques along with code samples. Here are the recording and the slides.
Recently, Cloudinary’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution was named a leader of the top 15 global vendors in the DAM Vendor Selection Matrix™ produced by Research in Action GmbH, excelling in strategy, execution, price versus value, and breadth. The matrix also awarded Cloudinary an outstanding recommendation index of 98%.
Since its founding Cloudinary has been a people-driven business. We wanted to create a culture fueled by transparency, trust and collaboration to encourage our employees to always be developing, learning and contributing.
Optimized media assets have always been essential to website performance. To help developers measure, understand and improve website performance, Google created Core Web Vitals, a subset of Web Vitals that focuses on three aspects of the user experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. In June 2021, Google plans to make page experience a ranking factor—so Core Web Vitals and media asset optimization will become even more important.
Setting up the infrastructure for video uploads can go from straightforward to complex real fast. Why? Because many challenges are involved in building a foolproof service for an efficient and smooth process.
For years, Google has been updating its search algorithm to prioritize end-user experience, displaying the most relevant and helpful content at the top of search results. The latest—and maybe the most significant—update so far is Core Web Vitals (CWVs), which are new metrics announced a year ago that will, starting in June, begin determining search rankings. With this update, Google is being abundantly clear that visual experience of webpages is paramount.
Videos are large media files—in most cases, at least four times larger than images—and are often created for ads, marketing campaigns, and instructional content to convey as much information as possible in a short time. Ensuring that videos do not buffer all the time and that the user’s data is protected from rapid consumption due to heavy page weight must be the modus operandi for all website builders and e-business owners.
The digital economy is driven by highly visual experiences. After all, viewers process images 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, it’s no surprise that top-notch visual media has been an essential component of a captivating e-commerce experience for years. Nor is it surprising that visual media’s importance only rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, a reality for all retailers, including our client Levi’s.
Cloudinary offers SDKs for many programming languages and frameworks. Even though it also offers an Upload API endpoint for both back-end and front-end code, most developers find the SDKs very helpful. If you're working with a powerful back-end framework like Python Flask, you'll be happy to hear that a Python SDK is now available.
This tutorial walks you through the process of building an API to upload images to Cloudinary. You can also upload other file types, including video and even nonmedia files, with the API.
At Cloudinary, we manage the entire pipeline of media assets for thousands of customers of varying sizes from numerous verticals.
As part of our commitment to support the entire flow of media assets, we are now introducing an intuitive media editing widget: an out-of-the-box, interactive UI providing your users with a set of common image editing actions for immediate use on your website or web app. The widget is interactive and simple, built on Cloudinary's transformation capabilities, and requiring only a few lines of code to integrate. Afterwards, you can seamlessly and effortlessly add content to your site or app with no need for in-house image editing capabilities.