As an experienced developer team at HireIndianProgrammers, we have been taking up diverse web development assignments from clients for over a decade. Some of these clients even come back with more projects, a testimony to our service delivery and quality. For any website with the mandate of improving customer engagement and footfalls and thereby sales, performance and speed of the website are important driving forces. There are components of the website that affects performance like JavaScript and media – images, audio, video etc. Images, by far, are the critical affecting component of page load times. Of late, we have been receiving projects from niche start-ups particularly in the e-commerce sector and small business segment. This only furthers the cause for uploading more high quality images on the website.
Therefore, there arises a need to balance performance with content accessibility/quality.With the emergence of smartphones of varying sizes, there is also the need for content optimisation. Any website taking more than 3 seconds to load can frustrate users. So how can images be optimised? Well, there is the manual way – resizing all the images of the website. But more often than not, it is impractical to adopt such a mechanism, given the huge volume of images at the client’s disposal. They surely cannot compromise on the number or quality of images, given their business depends on it. This is the basis for Image CDNs (Content Delivery Networks). In this blogpost, we make a case for Image CDN – the what and when and how to use it.
So when can a developer use Image CDN?
- Client’s website suffers from sluggish performance (high load times)
- Client’s website is largely composed of images
- There is a need to regularly add images
- Client caters to multiple geographical markets
- Customers using low grade mobile networks
What is behind the working of Image CDN? Image CDNs contribute to website performance by working on the following – a) Detecting the customer device, b) automated image compression/ optimisation based on the device configuration, c) global integrated delivery network. When a user visits the client’s website, a request is sent to the nearby server where the device’s configuration and capabilities – OS version (Android or iOS), Pixel resolution, image format support – is assessed after which the requested image is searched from the server’s cache. Either the image is readily delivered or optimised for the device, based on availability.
Image Compression and optimisation are done using a specialised algorithm. However, clients may fret over loss of image quality. Fortunately, with Image CDN, only extraneous details are removed and the image qualifies well enough for the naked eye. Based on the software present on the device and browser used by the user, the Image CDN will select the most efficient image file format – jpeg, WebP, PNG and so on. If the customer is from another country, then Image CDNs get the cached image from the nearest server to the user and deliver the same, thereby ensuring speed at any place.
Clients catering to diverse customers in different locations may want to hire a PHP developer who understands the power of Image CDNs. For further queries with regard to hiring our developers, get in touch by writing to us. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
