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.
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—retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality—which, coincidentally, all care about the same things.
I can be quite passionate about image codecs. A “codec battle” is brewing, and I’m not the only one to have opinions about that. Obviously, as the chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee, I’m firmly in the camp of the codec I’ve been working on for years. Here in this post, however, I’ll strive to be fair and neutral.
AVIF is a new image format for the web. Before I tell you all about it, let me show you what AVIF can do.
One way to compare image codecs is to encode the same image in different formats at matched file sizes and then compare the visual quality of the resulting images. For example, I rendered the AVIF below with a q_50 quality transformation. It weighs 12.3 KB and, compared to the lossless original it looks pretty good subjectively.
Is your web page speed a pitfall or a profit driver? If you don’t stay on top of optimizing rich media on your website, chances are your web performance is actively (and financially) working against you.
Fidelity in images is about visually preserving the original; appeal is about hiding the compression artifacts. Depending on your priority, you would compress images with either of these approaches to reduce the file size while still maintaining a reasonable level of visual “quality”:
VELTRA (a wordplay on TRAVEL) is a leading Japan-based travel marketplace with 4,000 international travel-agency partners, offering 27,000 local tours to over 150 destinations worldwide. In addition to featured travel itineraries, the VELTRA site also serves leisure travelers with meticulous support including tips and pointers along with comprehensive and helpful responses to questions.
Think about the last time you bought something online—and about the last time you did that but what you purchased wasn’t something you were after when you opened your browser. What captured your attention in the search results, the assortment page, or the product page that convinced you to make the purchase?