As website and mobile apps rely more on visual media to create engaging user experiences, delivering strong web and app performance becomes more challenging for developers. The faster your site, the more time visitors would spend on it. Conversely, the slower the site, the higher the bounce rate, and the lower Google ranks it in SEO.
However, how much time do you really have to measure and act on performance? Would you rather trust automation and a low-code/no-code (LCNC) approach to ensure high performance or work on it manually?
Read on for a handy tip on how to speed up media-heavy websites in short order with the latest no-code media service on the block: Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer.
Get to Know Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer
Media Optimizer from Cloudinary is a tool that performs three important tasks:
- Take your media, notably images and videos, from their existing hosting location.
- Create an optimized version of the media on the fly.
- Speedily deliver the media to your audience worldwide with low latency through a fast multi-CDN [content delivery network].
Have a Look at Three Use Cases
You might need to optimize your site in a jiffy under these circumstances:
- Your site engages in e-commerce and is media-heavy, which causes slow page loads. Improving the performance would involve a load of development work or manual optimization of each and every image on an image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop. You simply cannot afford the time and effort to do that.
- Slow page loads are affecting your bounce rates and SEO performance due to poor Core Web Vitals scores. As a result, your manager has requested that you optimize the company site, which boasts over hundreds or thousands of media files, in less than two days.
- You must optimize your media assets post-haste without moving them to another storage provider.
Take the Steps
Follow this procedure to accelerate page loads:
Step 1
Find out the answers to the three questions below by using Cloudinary’s Website Image Analysis Tool:
- How fast does your site load?
- What’s the page weight?
- Are you delivering images in formats optimized for all browsers?
Step 2
Sign up at Cloudinary for free to create a Media Optimizer account.
Step 3
Log in and click Configuration at the top and then +Add New in the screen that’s displayed. Name the new media source, select its type, and specify its URL, as shown in the screenshots below.
You’ve now configured the new media source.
Be sure to verify your setup. Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer serves optimized media through a domain of the format https://<cloud_name>.mo.cloudinary.net, where <cloud_name> is the name you gave your Media Optimizer cloud on creation. To locate that name, click Domains on the left of your dashboard. See below.
Speed Up Your Website Immediately
For a demo, see the following:
The original image of my website,
goodheads.io:https://goodheads.io/assets/2946769/22929944/f8508ffc-f272-11e6-82f2-b3bece9473fd.pngThe optimized version of the image:
https://prospermo.mo.cloudinary.net/assets/2946769/22929944/f8508ffc-f272-11e6-82f2-b3bece9473fd.png
I can now serve all the assets on my website on https://prospermo.mo.cloudinary.net without having to move them or understand how media optimization works.
https://www.mydomain.com/rest/of/the/path/myimage.jpg, which means that you must update the URL of the Media Optimizer cloud to https://mycloud.mo.cloudinary.net/rest/of/the/path/myimage.jpg.Try Out the Magic
Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer gives you wings and a platform to fly—with no requirements for technical know-how or mechanics. Just get on board and fly!
For more information on the optimizer, see the following:
