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Optimisation de clusters GKE: 14 tactiques pour un déploiement K8s plus fluide

Optimisation de clusters GKE: 14 tactiques pour un déploiement K8s plus fluide

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Découvrez comment optimiser vos clusters GKE et améliorer la fluidité de votre déploiement K8s grâce à ces 14 tactiques simples !

Comment s’assurer que votre cluster Google Kubernetes Engine est prêt pour les tempêtes à venir ?

Premièrement, l’optimisation de la sécurité. En tant qu’ingénieur informatique enthousiaste, je sais que la sécurité est une priorité absolue. Vous devez donc veiller à ce que votre cluster GKE soit protégé contre les menaces extérieures. Pour ce faire, vous devez configurer la sécurité des nœuds, définir des règles de pare-feu et utiliser des certificats TLS pour vous assurer que votre cluster est sûr et sécurisé. Vous devez également mettre en œuvre des contrôles d’accès et des stratégies de sécurité pour vous assurer que vos données et vos applications sont protégées.

Deuxièmement, l’optimisation de la disponibilité. Pour assurer une disponibilité maximale de votre cluster GKE, vous devez configurer le nombre de nœuds et leurs tailles pour répondre aux exigences de votre application. Vous devez également configurer des réplicas pour vos services et définir des règles de mise à l’échelle pour vous assurer que votre application est toujours disponible. Enfin, vous devez mettre en place des outils de surveillance pour vous assurer que votre cluster est toujours opérationnel.

Enfin, l’optimisation des coûts. Pour optimiser les coûts liés à votre cluster GKE, vous devez configurer le nombre de nœuds et leurs tailles pour répondre aux exigences de votre application. Vous pouvez également utiliser des outils tels que le codage pour réduire les coûts en réutilisant le code existant et en automatisant certaines tâches. Vous pouvez également utiliser des outils tels que Kubernetes pour optimiser les performances et réduire les coûts en répartissant les charges de travail sur plusieurs nœuds.

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Exciting New Features in Safari 16

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Apple has released an OS update. Packaged in with it is the latest version of Safari, 16.

Expected to be released ahead of next month’s macOS 13, Safari 16 is packed with updates, making it one of the most capable browsers available.

For web designers, the significance is the forward momentum in web technologies that enable freer design work and fewer hacks to achieve complex layouts. Little by little, CSS recommendations are being implemented to the point that using JavaScript for layout is rapidly becoming as unnecessary as it is disliked.

Some of this was announced in June in the Safari 16 beta. But a lot has been added in the last couple of months. So here’s what’s new in Safari 16 today.

CSS Container Queries

The most exciting addition to Safari 16 is CSS Container Queries.

It is hard to understate how in-demand this feature has been; if you imagine an edit button on Twitter that gifted you crypto every time you corrected a typo, you’d be getting close to how popular this feature is.

Until now, media queries have detected the whole viewport. And so, if you have an element like a card, for example, that needs to change at smaller viewports, you need to calculate the available space and adapt the element’s design accordingly. Unfortunately, this frequently gets out of sync with edge cases causing more than a few headaches for front-end developers.

Media queries are severely restrictive to modern layout methods like Grid that wrap elements automatically because there is no way to detect how the elements are laid out.

Container Queries solve this by allowing you to define styles based on the size of the actual containing element; if a div is 300px wide, the contents can have one design, and if it’s 400px wide, they can have a different design—all without caring what size the whole viewport is.

This is dangerously close to OOP (Object Orientated Programming) principles and almost elevates CSS to an actual programming language. (All we need is conditional logic, and we’re there.)

The latest versions of Chrome, Edge, and now Safari (including mobile) support CSS Grid. Even discounting the rapid decline of Twitter, this is way more exciting than any edit button.

CSS Subgrid

Speaking of Grid, if you’ve built a site with it (and if you haven’t, where have you been?), you’ll know that matching elements in complex HTML structures often results in nesting grids. Matching those grids requires careful management, CSS variables, or both. With CSS Subgrid, grids can inherit grid definitions from a grid defined higher up the hierarchy.

CSS Subgrid has been supported by Firefox for a while but is not yet part of Chrome or Edge. Until there’s wider support, it’s not a practical solution, and using a fallback negates any benefit of using Subgrid. However, its introduction in Safari will surely herald rapid adoption by Google and Microsoft and moves the web forward considerably.

CSS Subgrid is likely to be a practical solution within 18 months.

AVIF Support

AVIF is an exceptionally compact image format that beats even WebP in many instances. It even allows for sequences, creating what is essentially an animated GIF but smaller, and for bitmaps.

AVIF is already supported by Chrome, with partial support in Firefox. Safari now joins them.

AVIF support is one of the more valuable additions to Safari 16 because you’re probably already serving different images inside a picture element. If so, your Safari 16 users will begin receiving a smaller payload automatically, speeding up your site and boosting UX and SEO.

Enhanced Animation

Safari 16 introduces some significant improvements in animation, but the one that catches the eye is that you can now animate CSS Grid.

Yes, let that sink in. Combine Container Queries and animation. The possibilities for hover states on elements are tantalizing.

Safari 16 also supports CSS Offset Path — known initially as CSS Motion Path — which allows you to animate elements along any defined path. This enables the kind of animated effect that previously needed JavaScript (or Flash!) to accomplish.

Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all support CSS Offset Path; the addition of Safari means it’s now a practical solution that can be deployed in the wild.

Web Inspector Extensions

Announced as part of the beta release, Web Inspector Extensions allow web developers to create extensions for Safari, just as they would for Chrome.

Web Inspector Extensions — or Safari Extensions as they’re destined to be known — can be built in HTML, CSS, and JS, so the learning curve is shallow. It’s a good route into app development for web designers.

Because the underlying technology is the same as other browser extensions, anyone who has made a Chrome, Edge, or Firefox extension will be able to port it to Safari 16+ relatively easily. As a result, there should be a rapid expansion of the available extensions.

Improved Accessibility

Accessibility is key to an effective and inclusive web. Be like Bosch: everybody counts, or nobody counts.

When testing a design for accessibility, emulators don’t cut it. In my experience, Safari has some of the most reliable accessibility settings, especially when it comes to Media Queries like prefers-reduced-movement.

Further gains in this field mean that Safari continues to be an essential tool for QA tests.

Reduced Resets

Finally, I want to throw up my hands to celebrate the reduced number of non-standard CSS appearance settings.

For years we’ve been prefacing our style sheets with elaborate resets like Normalize, designed to undo all the assumptions browser developers make about design and the UI preferences of their engineers.

Safari 16 has reportedly “Removed most non-standard CSS appearance values.” How effective this is and how much we can rely on it given the other browsers on the market remains to be seen. However, like many of Safari 16’s changes, it’s a step towards a browser that’s on the developers’ side instead of an obstacle to overcome.

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WordPress Website Analysis: Before & After ImageEngine

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WordPress is by far the world’s most popular CMS. Not only does it dominate the CMS market with a 64% market share, but it also powers 39.6% of all websites. It has taken the internet by storm by democratizing the web for all. Now, anyone can build, manage, and host a successful website without needing a college degree or coding expertise.

However, while WordPress is great at managing many technical aspects, it still can’t do everything for you. Built mostly on PHP, there are often concerns regarding how performant WordPress is. And, with performance impacting everything from bounce rates to SEO rankings to conversions, it’s something that should be on your radar too.

If you don’t know it yet, images are one of the main causes of slow-loading websites. In recent years, WordPress has stepped up its efforts to try and help users with image optimization out-of-the-box.

Still, as we’ll show, it’s not a total solution, and there is still plenty you can do to deliver better experiences on your WordPress website through image optimization.

What is WordPress Image Optimization? Why is it Important?

Simply put, image optimization is anything you do to make images load faster on your website pages. Almost all websites that use images can benefit from some form of image optimization, even those using WordPress.

Why?

Well, performance is a hugely significant factor when it comes to the competitiveness of your website today.

Google has also made performance an increasingly important factor when it comes to SEO rankings. In fact, performance is a direct ranking signal that carries significant weight.

Google’s Page Experience Update that went live in 2021 has been the biggest move in that direction yet. Soon, Google might even use visual indicators in SERP results to distinguish high-performing websites from the rest.

In Google’s own words, “These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experiences from the web.”

So, Why Should We Target Images For Performance Optimization?

According to Google, images are the largest contributor to page weight. Google has also singled out image optimization specifically as the factor with the most untapped potential for performance optimization.

This problem isn’t going away soon. According to data by the HTTP Archive, there are roughly 967.5 KB bytes of image data on desktop web pages and 866.3 KB of image data on mobile pages. This is an increase of 16.1% and 38.8%, respectively, over the last five years.

Thanks to popular e-commerce tools like Woocommerce, it’s estimated that up to 28% of all online sales happen on WordPress websites.

And don’t forget, images are both a key part of conveying information to the user and integral to the design of your website. If they take significantly longer to load than your text, for example, it will negatively impact the user experience in a variety of ways.

In summary, optimized images help your WordPress website by:

  • Improving user satisfaction.
  • Improving various traffic metrics, like bounce rates, time-on-page, etc.
  • Boosting your SEO rankings.
  • Contributing to higher conversions (and sales).

How Does Image Optimization in WordPress Work?

WordPress is so popular because it’s a CMS (content management system) that allows anyone to build, design, and manage a website without any coding or advanced technical experience. Advanced features can be installed with just a few clicks, thanks to plugins, and you rarely have to touch the code behind your website unless you want to make some unique modifications.

In short, using a CMS like WordPress shields you from many of the day-to-day technicalities of running a website.

WordPress Image Optimization: What It Can Do

As we mentioned, one of the main reasons WordPress is so popular is because it takes care of many of the technical aspects of running a website. With that in mind, many think that WordPress should also automatically take care of image optimization without them having to get involved at all.

Unfortunately, that’s not really the case.

True, WordPress does offer some built-in image optimization. Whenever you upload an image to WordPress, it currently compresses the quality to about 82% of the original (since v4.5).

In v4.4, WordPress also introduced responsive image syntax using the srcset attribute. This creates four breakpoints for each image you upload according to the default WordPress image sizes:

  • 150px square for thumbnails
  • 300px width for medium images
  • 768px max-width for medium_large images
  • 1024px max-width for large images.

Here you can see an example of the actual responsive syntax code generated by WordPress:

<img loading="lazy" src="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-9" width="610" height="406" srcset="https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-300x200.jpg 300w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-768x512.jpg 768w, https://bleedingcosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/33-1536x1024.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 610px) 100vw, 610px">

Depending on the screen size of the device from which a user visits your webpage, WordPress will let the browser pick the most appropriately sized image. For example, the smallest version for mobile displays or the largest for 4K Retina screens, like those of a Mac.

While this may seem impressive, it’s only a fraction of what can be achieved using a proper image optimization solution, as we’ll show later.

Lastly, WordPress implemented HTML native default lazy loading for all images starting with version 5.5.

So, in short, WordPress offers the following image optimization capabilities baked-in:

  • Quality compression (limited)
  • Responsive syntax (up to 4 breakpoints)
  • Lazy loading

WordPress Image Optimization: What it Cannot Do

There are other issues many have with both the implementation of image compression and responsive syntax as it’s used by WordPress. This leads to some users even purposefully deactivating WordPress’ built-in image optimization so they can fully take control of it themselves.

Here are some of the reasons why:

  • WordPress uses a very basic form of quality compression. It does not use advanced technologies like AI and machine learning algorithms to compress images while maintaining maximum visual quality. It’s also lossy compression, so the quality is lost for good. You can clearly see the difference between an original HD image and the compressed version created by WordPress.
  • WordPress only compresses most images by up to 20%, while advanced image optimization tools can reduce all image sizes intelligently by up to 80%.
  • Responsive syntax can provide significant performance improvements over simply uploading a single HD image to be served on all devices and screens. However, it’s still only limited to a set number of breakpoints (typically 3 or 4). Since it’s not dynamic, a whole spectrum of possible image sizes is not created or used.
  • Responsive syntax code is not scalable and can quickly lead to code that’s bloated, messy, and hard to read.
  • WordPress doesn’t accelerate image delivery by automatically caching and serving them via a global CDN, although this can be done using other tools.

Another important optimization feature that WordPress does not have is auto-conversion to next-gen image file formats. Different image formats offer different performance benefits on different devices. Some formats also enable higher levels of compression while maintaining visual fidelity.

Next-gen formats like WebP, AVIF, and JPEG-2000 are considered to be the most optimal formats on compatible devices. For example, until recently, WebP would be the optimal choice on Chrome browsers, while JPEG-4000 would be optimal on Safari browsers.

However, WordPress will simply serve images in the same formats in which they were originally uploaded to all visitors.

How to Measure the Image Performance of a WordPress Website?

As the undisputed king of search engines, we’ll base most of our performance metrics on guidelines established by Google.

Along with its various performance updates, Google has released a number of guidelines for developers as well as the tools to test and improve their websites according to said guidelines.

Google introduced Core Web Vitals as the primary metrics for measuring a web page’s performance and its effect on the user experience. Thus, Core Web Vitals are referred to as “user-centric performance metrics.” They are an attempt to give developers a testable and quantifiable way to measure an elusive and abstract concept such as “user experience.”

Combined with a number of other factors, Core Web Vitals constitute a major part of the overall page experience signal:

You can find a complete introduction to Core Web Vitals here. However, they currently consist of three main metrics:

  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): The time it takes the largest above-the-fold element on your page to load. This is typically a full-sized image or hero section.
  • FID (First Input Delay): The delay from the moment a user first interacts with an element on the page until it becomes responsive.
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): The visual stability with which the elements on a page load.

Here is an illustration of how these metrics are scored:

While these are the three most important metrics to optimize, they are not the only ones. Google still measures other metrics like the FCP (First Contentful Paint), SI (Speed Index), as well as the TTFB (Time to First Byte), TBT (Total Blocking Time), and TTI (Time to Interactive).

A number of these metrics are directly affected by the images used on your web pages. For example, LCP, FCP, and SI are direct indicators of how fast the content of your web page loads and depends on the overall byte size of the page. However, it can also indirectly affect FID by keeping the main thread busy with rendering large amounts of image content or the perceived CLS by delaying the time it takes large images to load.

These metrics apply to all websites, whether they are custom-made or built using a CMS like WordPress.

When using tools like Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights, you’ll also get scored based on other flags Google deems important. Some of them are specific to images, such as properly sizing images and serving images in next-gen formats.

If you only use built-in WordPress image optimization, you’ll get flagged for the following opportunities for improvement:

Some of the audits it will pass, however, are deferring offscreen images (lazy loading) and efficiently coding images (due to compression):

A Better Way to Optimize WordPress Images: ImageEngine

Billions of websites are all vying for prime real estate on Google SERPs, as well as the attention of an increasingly fussy internet-using public. Every inch matters when it comes to giving your website a competitive advantage.

So, how can you eliminate those remaining performance flags and deliver highly optimized images that will keep both your visitors and Google happy?

Sure, you could manually optimize images using software like PhotoShop or GIMP. However, that will take you hours for each new batch of images. Plus, you still won’t benefit from any automated adaptive optimization.

A more reasonable solution in today’s fast-paced climate is to use a tool developed specifically for maximum image optimization: an image CDN like ImageEngine.

ImageEngine is an automated, cloud-based image optimization service using device detection as well as intelligent image compression using the power of AI and machine learning. It can reduce image payloads by up to 80% while maintaining visual quality and accelerating delivery around the world thanks to its CDN with geographically dispersed PoPs.

Why is ImageEngine Image Optimization Better Than WordPress?

When making a head-to-head comparison, here are the reasons why ImageEngine can deliver better performance:

  • Device Detection: ImageEngine features built-in device detection. This means it picks up what device a visitor to your website is using and tailors its optimization strategy to what’s best for that specific device.
  • Client hints: By supporting client hints, ImageEngine has access to even more information regarding the device and browser to make better optimization decisions.
  • Next-gen formats: Based on optimal settings, ImageEngine automatically converts and serves images in next-gen formats like WebP, AVIF, JPEG2000, and MP4 (for GIFs).
  • Save data header: When a Chrome user has save-data mode enabled, ImageEngine will automatically compress images more aggressively to save on data transfer.
  • CDN with dedicated edge servers: ImageEngine will automatically cache and serve your optimized image assets using its global CDN. Each edge server has device awareness built-in to bring down latency and accelerate delivery. You can also choose to prioritize specific regions.

So, the key differentiator is that ImageEngine can tailor optimizing images for what’s optimal for each of your visitors. ImageEngine is particularly good at serving mobile visitors thanks to WURFL device detection, which can dynamically resize images according to most devices and screen sizes in use today. As of now, this is a completely unique capability that none of its competitors offer.

It allows for far better and more fine-tuned optimization than WordPress’ across-the-board approach to compression and responsive syntax.

If you want, you could turn off WordPress responsive syntax and compression, and you would still experience a performance increase using ImageEngine. However, ImageEngine also plays nice with responsive syntax, so it’s not completely necessary unless you want to serve the highest-fidelity/low-byte-size images possible.

How Does ImageEngine Work with WordPress?

The process ImageEngine uses to integrate with WordPress can be broken down into a few easy steps:

  • Sign up for an ImageEngine account: ImageEngine offers three pricing plans depending on the scale and features you need as well as a no-commitment 30-day free trial.
  • Specify your image origin: This tells ImageEngine where to find the original versions of your images. For a WordPress website, you can just use your domain, e.g., https://mywordpresswebsite.com. ImageEngine will then automatically pull the images you’ve uploaded to your WordPress website.

  • Copy the Delivery Address: After you create an account and specify your image origin, ImageEngine will provide you with a Delivery Address. A Delivery Address is your own unique address that will be used in your <img> tags to point back to the ImageEngine service. Delivery Addresses may be on a shared domain (imgeng.in) or customized using a domain that you own. A Delivery Address typically looks something like {random_string}.cdn.imgeng.in. If your images are uploaded to the default WordPress folder /wp-content/uploads/, you can access your optimized images from ImageEngine simply by changing your website domain. For example, by typing {imageengine_domain}.cdn.imgeng.in/wp-content/uploads/myimage.jpg into your browser, you’ll see the optimized version of that image. Just press the copy button next to the Delivery Address and use it in the next step configuring the plugin.

  • Install the ImageEngine Optimizer CDN plugin: The plugin is completely free and can be installed just like any other plugin from the WordPress repository.
  • Configure and enable ImageEngine Plugin in WordPress: Just go to the plugin under “ImageEngine” in the main navigation menu. Then, copy and paste in your ImageEngine “Delivery Address,” tick the “Enabled” checkbox, and click “Save Changes” to enable ImageEngine:

Now, all ImageEngine basically does is replace your WordPress website domain in image URLs with your new ImageEngine Delivery Address. This makes it a simple, lightweight, and non-interfering plugin that works great with most other plugins and themes. It also doesn’t add unnecessary complexity or weight to your WordPress website pages.

ImageEngine vs Built-in WordPress Image Optimization

So, now let’s get down to business by testing the performance improvement you can expect from using ImageEngine to optimize your image assets.

To do this test, we set up a basic WordPress page containing a number of high-quality images. I then used PageSpeed Insights and the Lighthouse Performance Calculator to get the performance scores before and after using ImageEngine.

Importantly, we conducted this test from a mobile-first perspective. Not only has mobile internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic globally, but Google themselves have committed to mobile-first indexing as a result.

Here is a PageSpeed score using the Lighthouse calculator for WordPress with no image optimization:

As we can see, both Core Web Vitals and other important metrics were flagged as “needs improvement.” Specifically, the LCP, FCP, and TBT. In this case, both the LCP and FCP were a high-res featured image at the top of the page.

If we go to the opportunities for improvement highlighted by PageSpeed, we see where the issues come from. We could still save as much as 4.2s of loading time by properly resizing images and a further 2.7s by serving them in next-gen formats:

So, now let’s see how much ImageEngine can improve on that.

The same test run on my WordPress website using ImageEngine got the following results:

As you can see, we now have a 100 PageSpeed score. I saved roughly 2.5s on the SI (~86%) as well as roughly 1.7s on the LCP (~60%). There was also a slight improvement in the FCP.

Not only will you enjoy a stronger page experience signal from Google, but this represents a tangible difference to visitors regarding the speed with which your website loads. That difference will lead to lower bounce rates, increased user satisfaction, and more conversions.

There was also a 53% overall reduction in the total image payload. This is impressive, considering that it’s on top of WordPress’ built-in compression and responsive syntax.

Conclusion

So, as someone with a WordPress website, what can you take away from this?

Well, first of all, WordPress does feature some basic image optimization. And while not perfect, it should help you offer reasonable levels of performance, even if you use a lot of image content.

However, the caveat is that WordPress applies aggressive, across-the-board compression, which will lead to a noticeable reduction in visual quality. If you use WordPress for any type of website where premium quality images are important, this is a concern — for example, as a photography portfolio, exhibition, or image marketplace like Shutterstock.

By using ImageEngine, you can reduce image payloads and accelerate delivery even further without compromising too harshly on visual quality. What’s more, ImageEngine’s adaptive image optimization technology will provide greater improvements to more of your visitors, regardless of what device(s) they use to browse the web.

Whether or not you still want to use WordPress’ built-in optimizations, ImageEngine will deliver significant improvements to your user experience, traffic metrics, and even conversions.

Plus, true to the spirit of WordPress, it’s extremely simple to set up without any advanced configuration. Just sign up for ImageEngine in 3 easy steps, install the plugin, integrate ImageEngine by copy/pasting your image domain, and you’re good to go.

 

[ This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine ]

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5 Big Web Design Predictions for 2022

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Every year, at this time, blogs like this one like to try and predict what’s going to happen in the year ahead. It’s a way of drawing a line under the archive and starting afresh. A rejuvenation that, as humans, we find life-affirming.

Ten years ago, I would have had high confidence in these predictions — after all I was eventually right about SVG adoption, even if it took a decade. But the last few years have shown that web design is tightly interwoven with the muggle world, and that world is anything but predictable.

So as we look at what might occur in the next year (or five), think of it less as a set of predictions and more as a wishlist.

Last Year’s Predictions

When I write this post every January, I like to keep myself honest by glancing back at the previous year’s predictions to gauge how accurate (or not) my predictions have been.

Last year I predicted the long-term trend for minimalism would end, WordPress would decline, cryptocurrency would go mainstream, and then hedged my bets by saying we’d make both more and fewer video calls.

Gradients, maximalism, and the nineties revival pulled us away from minimalism. It’s still popular, just not as dominant.

WordPress is still the biggest CMS in the world and will continue to be for some time. But the relentless grind of no-code site builders at the low end, and being outperformed by better CMS at the high end, mean that WordPress has passed its peak.

Over-inflated predictions for BitCoin reaching $100k by December 2021 turned out to be a damp squib. In the end, Bitcoin only tripled in value in 2021. However, with micro-tipping and major tech companies moving into the arena, it’s clear digital currency arrived in the public consciousness in 2021.

And how could I be wrong about more but also fewer video calls? So I’m calling that my first clean sweep ever. With that heady boast, let’s take a look at the next twelve months.

What Not to Expect in 2022

Do not expect the Metaverse to be significant in anything but marketing speak. Yes, the hardware is slowly becoming more available, but the Metaverse in 2022 is like playing an MMORPG on PS5: theoretically, great fun, until you discover that absolutely none of your friends can get their hands on a console.

Ignore the blog posts predicting a noughties-era retro trend. All those writers have done is looked at the nineties-era trend and added a decade. Fashions aren’t mathematical; they’re poetic. Retro happens when people find a period that rhymes with present-day hopes and fears. After the last couple of years, if we revisit a decade, it’s likely to be the late-forties.

Finally, don’t expect seismic change. Material design, parallax scrolling, and jQuery are still with us and are still valid choices under the right circumstances. Trends aren’t neat; they don’t start in January and conclude in December.

5 Web Design Predictions for 2022

Predictions tend to be self-fulfilling. So we’ve limited ourselves to five trends that we believe are either positive or, at worst harmless. Of course, there are no guarantees, but if these come to pass, we’ll be in good shape for 2023.

1. The Blockchain is Coming

Underpinning the cryptocurrency industry are blockchains. In simple terms, they’re a set of data that can be appended to but can’t be edited or deleted. Think of it as version control for data.

As with most technology, the first wave has been a way to make a fast buck. However, the exciting development is blockchain technology itself and the transformative nature of the approach. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières reportedly stores refugees’ medical records on the blockchain.

Imagine the Internet as a set of data, editable for a micro-fee, and freely accessed by anyone anywhere. Instead of millions of sites, a single, secure, autonomous source of truth. Someone somewhere’s working on it.

2. Positivity & Playfulness & A11y

Even before world events descended into an endless tirade of grim news, time was running out for dull, corporate, geometric sans-serif design.

We added gradients, we added personality, we embraced humor. And contrary to the established business logic, we still make money. Over the past few years, there have been extraordinary efforts by designers and developers to examine, test, and champion accessibility, and thanks to them, inclusive design is no longer reliant on the lowest common denominator.

In 2022 you can get experimental without obstructing 10%+ of your users.

3. Everything Green

Green is a fascinating color, the primary that isn’t (except in RGB, when it is).

Green has the same visual weight as blue, is substantially more flexible, and yet to date, has been radically underutilized in digital design.

Green has a prominent cultural association with the environment. At a time when tech companies are desperate to emphasize their ethical credentials, marketing companies will inevitably begin promoting a brand color shift to green as a quick fix for all those dumped chemicals, strip mines, and plastic-filled seas.

We’ve already seen earthy hues acquire popular appeal. At the other end of the vibrancy scale, neons are popular. Green spans both approaches with everything from calm sages to acidic neons.

In 2022, if you’re looking for a color to capture the moment, look to green.

4. Hero Text

A picture is supposed to be worth 1000 words, although I’m not sure anyone has actually tried to measure it. The problem is that sites increasingly rely on stock images, so the 1000 words that we’re getting may or may not accurately reflect 100% of our message.

In 2022, a handful of well-chosen words will be worth more than an image, with hero images taking a back seat to large hero text. This is aided by a number of minor trends, the most notable of which is the willingness of businesses to look beyond the geometric sans-serif to a more expressive form of typography.

Reading through the prediction posts on sites other than this, almost everyone agrees on large hero text replacing images, which virtually guarantees it won’t happen. Still, at the start of 2022, this seems to be the direction we’re taking.

5. Bring the Noise

One of the unexpected consequences of the past couple of years has been a renewed connection with nature. The effortless complexity in nature is endlessly engaging.

We’ve already begun to popularise gradients — there are no flat colors in nature — and the next logical step is the addition of noise.

In visual terms, noise is the grainy texture that sits so beautifully in vector illustrations. Noise has dipped in and out of trends for years, hampered a little by the leap in file size it creates. However, with WebP and Avif file types, noise is now usable on production sites.

Designing in 2022, when in doubt, throw some noise at it.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

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4 Steps to Improve PageSpeed Insights Score and SEO

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PageSpeed Insights is a free performance measurement tool provided by Google. It analyzes the contents of a web page for desktop and mobile devices. It provides a single number score (from 1 to 100) that summarizes several underlying metrics that measure performance. If you have not run PageSpeed Insights on your website, then you should stop and do it now. It’s an important indicator of how Google scores and ranks your site.

If your PageSpeed Insights score is below 80, don’t panic. You are not alone. Many websites are not optimized for performance. The good news is that you can take steps that should immediately improve your score.

You will notice that PageSpeed Insights highlights issues that cause slow page loading. However, you might need more guidance to resolve these issues. Below, we walk you through how to resolve four common issues related to images. We also show you how ImageEngine, an image CDN, can simplify, automate, and deliver the best image optimization solution possible.

Performance Drives Google SEO Rankings

Why does the PageSpeed Insights score and performance matter? Isn’t SEO ranking all about content relevance, backlinks, and domain authority? Yes, but now performance matters more than it did a year ago. Starting in 2021, Google added performance metrics to the factors that impact search engine rankings. In a market where websites are constantly jockeying to match their competition’s pages (for content relevance, keywords, and other SEO issues), performance is making a difference in keyword search engine rankings.

What Are Core Web Vitals Metrics?

PageSpeed Insights relies on a set of performance metrics called Core Web Vitals. These metrics are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the render time (in seconds) of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading. Typically, the largest image is the hero image at the top of pages.

First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (i.e. when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the layout shift that occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next.

Images and JavaScript are the Main Culprits

PageSpeed Insights breaks down problems into categories based upon how they impact these Core Web Vitals metrics. The top two reasons why you might have a low score are driven by JavaScript and images.

JavaScript issues are usually related to code that either blocks or delays page loading. For example, lazy-loading images might involve JavaScript that blocks loading. As a rule of thumb, do not use a third-party JavaScript library to manage image loading. These libraries frequently break the browser’s built-in image loading features. Lazy-loading may make above-the-fold images load slower (longer LCP) because the browser starts the download later and because the browser first has to execute the JavaScript.

Another JavaScript issue involves code that is large or unnecessary for the page. In other words, code bloat. There are good resources for resolving these issues on the web. However, in this blog, we will focus on image problems.

Images are a major contributor to poor performance. The average website payload is 2MB in 2021, and 50% of that is images. Frequently, images are larger than they need to be and can be optimized for size with no impact on quality…if you do it right.

Four Image Issues Highlighted by PageSpeed Insights

Largest Contentful Paint is the primary metric impacted by images. PageSpeed Insights frequently recommends the following four pieces of advice:

  1. Serve images in next-gen formats.
  2. Efficiently encode images.
  3. Properly size images.
  4. Avoid enormous network payloads.

That advice seems straightforward. Google provides some great advice on how to deal with images in its dev community. It can be summarized in the following steps:

  • Select the appropriate file format.
  • Apply the appropriate image compression.
  • Apply the right display size.
  • Render the image.
  • Write responsive image code to select the right variant of the image.

We call Google’s process the “Build-Time Responsive Syntax” approach. If you have a relatively static website where you don’t generate new pages or switch out images frequently, then you can probably live with this approach. However, if you have a large and dynamic site with many images, then you will quickly feel the pain of this approach. Google itself stresses that developers should seek to automate this image process. Why? Because the process has some serious workflow drawbacks:

  • Adds storage requirements due to a large increase in image variants.
  • Increases code bloat and introduces more code complexity.
  • Requires developers’ time and effort to create variants and implement responsiveness.
  • Requires logic to account for different browser’s support for next-gen image formats.
  • Doesn’t adapt to different contexts. It relies on best-guess (breakpoints) of what device visits the web page.
  • Needs a separate CDN to further increase delivery speeds.
  • Requires ongoing maintenance to adapt to new devices, breakpoints, image formats, markets, and practices.

Key Steps to Achieving High-Performance Images

Instead of using the Build-Time Responsive Syntax approach, an automated image CDN solution can address all of the image issues raised by PageSpeed Insights. The key steps of an image CDN that you should look for are:

  1. Detect Mobile Devices: Detection of a website visitor’s device model and its technical capabilities. These include: OS version, browser version, screen pixel density, screen resolution width and height, support for next-gen image and video formats. This is where ImageEngine is unique in the market. ImageEngine uses true mobile device detection to further improve image optimization. It has a huge impact on the effectiveness of the image optimization process.
  2. Optimize Images: An image CDN will leverage the device’s parameters to automatically resize, compress and convert large original images into optimized images with next-generation file formats, like WebP and AVIF. Frequently, an image CDN like ImageEngine will reduce the image payload by up to 80%.
  3. Deliver by CDN: Image CDNs like ImageEngine have edge servers strategically positioned around the globe. By pushing optimized images closer to requesting customers and delivering them immediately from the cache, it often provides a 50% faster web page download time than traditional CDNs.

Easy Integration Process for Image CDN

After signing up for an ImageEngine account and free trial, you will receive a Delivery Address. After adjusting your <img /> elements to include the Delivery Address, ImageEngine will start to pull the original images from your website (no need to move or upload them), automatically optimize them, and deliver them.

You can automate the addition of the Delivery Address to the img src tag by using plug-ins for WordPress and Magento. Developers can also use ImageEngine’s React, Vue, or Angular JavaScript frameworks to simplify the process.

Additionally, there are many ways to simplify implementation via adjustments to templates for many CMS and eCommerce platforms.

Results: Improved Performance, Better SEO

Most ImageEngine users see a huge improvement in LCP metrics, and consequently, a big improvement in the overall PageSpeed Insights score. ImageEngine provides a free demo analysis of your images before and after image optimization. In many cases, developers see improvements of many seconds on their LCP and Speed Index.

In summary, performance drives higher search rankings, and better UX, and increases website conversions for eCommerce. The steps you take to improve your image performance will pay for themselves in more sales and conversions, streamlined workflow, and lower CDN delivery costs.

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Popular Design News of the Week: June 14 2021 – June 20, 2021

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Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

22 Exciting New Tools for Designers, June 2021

7.css

Does the Hamburger Menu Make Mincemeat of UX Design?

Top 15 Tools and Resources for Designers and Agencies

Loaf Animation SVG Library

WordPress 5.8 Introduces Support for WebP Images

Star Trek + Design

11 Landing Page Design Tips You Should Follow Today

Isometrica 3D Constructor

HTML Semantic Tags Cheat Sheet

What is a Design System?

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Start Using a Smart DAM and Image Optimization Stack

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Asset management and website performance optimization are two of those unavoidable headaches faced by every website owner.

A digital asset management (DAM) platform can provide centralized asset repositories with intuitive dashboards to help you manage assets. On the other hand, an image CDN can help you get rid of that messy responsive syntax and provide dynamic asset optimization with huge performance boosts.

The problem is that website performance has become such a competitive factor that DAMs with other priorities tend to fall short. On the other hand, specialized image CDNs don’t solve the problems associated with image management, particularly within organizations.

With that in mind, I propose solving these problems for good by putting together image management and optimization stack using ImageEngine and Cloudinary. Instead of being a comparison between these two tools, this article describes the benefits of using them to complement each other.

Features and Asset Management Capabilities

As a DAM, Cloudinary provides you with a visual interface to store, manage, and edit your image and video assets. In that way, it’s not much different from any other professional image managing software such as Adobe Bridge, except that it’s an online, browser-based service.

Using the Media Library, you can upload, delete, and organize images in folders, for example. The visual image editor allows you to make advanced transformations and image touch-ups and see the results instantaneously using tools like sliders, dropdowns, etc. You can even chain transformations together for multi-layered effects.

Cloudinary also allows you to manipulate images and videos this way using their URL-based API.

Cloudinary has additional auxiliary features that make asset management easier (especially in organizations), such as backups, role-based multi-user admin, and feature extensions via third-party integrations and add-ons.

This is something most image CDNs don’t provide. Instead, they allow you to access and transform images using URL manipulation. Transformations are usually made using string-based parameters or directives. A serverless, headless DAM, if you will.

However, the advantage of using a dedicated image CDN like ImageEngine, is that it can usually provide enhanced asset optimization. ImageEngine, for example, is an intelligent image CDN that uses WURFL device detection to finely read the context an image is accessed from (device model, PPI, OS, browser, resolution, etc.) and then chooses the optimal image for that configuration.

This frees up website owners from having to do any additional optimization. This business logic is also built-in to all of their global PoP servers, and ImageEngine specifically delivers cache-hit ratios close to 100%. The following performance section will illustrate the difference this can make in practice.

Check out the key differences between ImageEngine and Cloudinary. And, for a deeper insight, see the comparison with other similar CDNs, like imgix and Cloudflare

Performance

Just to cover our bases and prove that this is an effective asset management and optimization stack, I’m also going to affirm it using a Lighthouse performance audit. Here is a quick summary of the results:

For this test, I built a web page with a tonne of images with overly large file sizes. In this first Lighthouse audit, I didn’t apply any optimization to the images. Here’s the result:

As you can see, we had some major problems when it came to the loading time of our assets. Overall, the page took more than 10 seconds to load. One of Google’s crucial user-centric performance metrics, LCP, scored a miserable 7.5s. Lighthouse suggested that some of the main problems encountered were the asset file size, inefficient cache policies, using non-optimal image formats, and improperly sized images.

Both Cloudinary and ImageEngine are supposed to address all of these factors with their auto image optimization. In the next audit, I used the same page and content but served my images via Cloudinary:

As you can see, there is improvement in most factors. FCP is now in the green, and both the Speed index and LCP times have almost halved. Even TTI and CLS improved slightly. That being said, it’s still nowhere near optimal, and we’re still falling short of the all-important 3-second loading time ceiling.

So, finally, let’s do another Lighthouse audit – this time using ImageEngine on top of Cloudinary. Here are the results:

With ImageEngine, I finally scored in the green with 95. All the metrics that have to do with the sheer speed at which image content loads improved. The Speed Index and LCP, which is the most important, improved dramatically. CLS scored worse, but this typically varies from test to test.

You can find another and more extensive breakdown of the performance and pricing comparison here.

Transformations, Bandwidth Utilization, and Cost

Cloudinary’s pricing plans work on a credit-based system. Starting with the free account, you get 25 credits/month. Each credit can be used for 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of net viewing bandwidth. The other two packages cost $99 for 225 credits and $249 for 600 credits, respectively.

You should plan to generate a minimum of 5 transformations per image. In effect, that limits you to around 200 images with the free plan, excluding whatever manual transformations you make.

ImageEngine’s Basic plan costs $49 and provides you with 100 GB of Smart Bytes. Smart Bytes are based on optimized image content and translate to roughly 400-500 GB of raw images.

So, with Cloudinary, you have to compromise between bandwidth and storage usage as well as the number of transformations you can make. Transformations for Cloudinary are counted as they are dynamically generated on-demand.

However, if you use ImageEngine for optimization, you can switch off Cloudinary’s auto-optimization. When a new image variant is needed, it will be generated and delivered via ImageEngine. Considering variant count isn’t limited by ImageEngine, this will drastically cut down on the number of credits you’ll need to spend on transformations.

Effectively, that means you could use the bulk of your Cloudinary credits purely for storage and specific transformations. For example, advanced cropping, applying effects, or color adjustments. These are, after all, the main functions of a DAM.

With this setup, ImageEngine’s Basic plan and Cloudinary’s free plan should be adequate for most websites, saving around $50 a month.

How to Implement Cloudinary with ImageEngine

Signing up for Both Services

As it will house all of your image assets, the logical place to start would be to sign up with Cloudinary.

Create a (free) account, and make sure to take note of your “cloud name” during the setup wizard. This will be the name of your designated storage location on the Cloudinary platform and is usually a garbled string like di2zgnxh0 by default. However, you can change this to something more meaningful.

Once you’ve signed up, you can start uploading your image assets and creating different versions/transformations of them. Setting up Cloudinary integration on a CMS, like WordPress, is usually straightforward. Just indicate the CMS you’ll be using, copy the API key, install the plugin, and activate it.

Next, sign up for a free trial with ImageEngine. There will also be a short setup wizard during which you will:

  1. Provide ImageEngine with the website where your images will be delivered.
  2. Supply your image origin (in this case, your Cloudinary web folder). For now, you can only add the Cloudinary, e.g., res.cloudinary.com.
  3. Get your ImageEngine image-serving domain, e.g., {randomstring}.cdn.imgeng.in

When in your ImageEngine dashboard, you’ll see this domain listed under “Engines” as well as an entry for Cloudinary under “Origins.” Edit the latter and under “Advanced,” add your Cloudinary folder to the “PATH” field.

That’s it, you should now be able to store and manage images via Cloudinary and serve them via the ImageEngine CDN.

Dynamically Loading Specific Image Variants

Let’s take a look at a use case for loading different transformations of individual images on your site. This example will showcase how you can use Cloudinary’s advanced image editing tools to transform images while still reaping the optimization rewards of using ImageEngine as your image CDN.

A popular practice today is to use rounded images for team, client, or profile portraits. Using Cloudinary, you can load this transformation using the following URL:

https://res.cloudinary.com/myimages/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/profile.jpg

This will resize the image to 400 by 400px, focus on the face, and apply the maximum amount of radial cropping around it – to a width of 200px.

The same image can then be accessed via your ImageEngine delivery engine simply by swapping out the domain:

https://images.myimageengine.com.imgeng.in/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/profile.jpg

NOTE: I added my Cloudinary folder designation (“myimages”) as the path to my image origin. With that config, I don’t need to include it every time I use the image URL.

For example, you can set up the origin like this:

And, then under advanced:

If I specifically wanted to load the profile picture in WebP format (for transparency support, for example), I could add the ImageEngine directive f_webp:

https://images.myimageengine.com.imgeng.in/image/upload/w_400,h_400,c_crop,g_face,r_max/w_200/?imgeng=/f_webp/profile.jpg

ImageEngine and Cloudinary – The Wrap Up

Both ImageEngine and Cloudinary are superb platforms that can make managing image and video assets easier and improve your website maintenance. However, both services have their specialty in which they outperform each other.

For ImageEngine, it’s delivering blisteringly fast image loading times in next-gen formats and with a minimal loss of visual quality.

For Cloudinary, it’s providing a visual interface to organize, store, and edit your image and video assets.

As a further incentive, letting each of these services handle what they’re best at can lead to lowering your long-term operating costs.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

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Create Beautiful WordPress Pages with Optimized Images Using Elementor and ImageEngine

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WordPress powers nearly 40% of all websites, thanks to its commitment to making publication possible for everyone, for free. Combined with premium plugins and themes, it’s possibly the ultimate tool for building attractive, unique, and feature-rich websites without any coding or design experience.

However, you do pay the price for this experience, with WordPress and its third-party products not always being built for performance – whether it’s page loading times or SEO.

Image optimization is a particularly big concern. Images are one, if not the largest, contributors to page weight, and it’s growing significantly by the year. So, while images are crucial for beautifying your website pages, they are also one of the biggest factors slowing it down.

In terms of image optimization, WordPress+Elementor brings very little to the table. WordPress core now comes with both responsive syntax and lazy-loading. Elementor itself also only comes with responsive syntax out-of-the-box. However, these are baseline techniques for image optimization that will deliver the bare minimum of improvements.

This means that, while Elementor makes it easy to design sweet-looking WordPress pages (with tonnes of creatively utilized images), you will probably pay the price when it comes to performance. But don’t worry. We will show you how to dramatically improve web performance by over 30 points on scoring tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insight. 

Why Optimize Your Elementor Images with ImageEngine?

In general, image CDNs use various techniques to get image payloads as small as possible and deliver image content faster, all while minimizing the visual impact. ImageEngine is no different in that regard.

Firstly, ImageEngine, when used in auto mode, will apply all of the following optimizations that web performance tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insight recommend. For example:

  • Properly size images – ImageEngine automatically resizes images for optimal size-to-quality ratios depending on the screen size of the user device. ImageEngine supports Retina devices.
  • Efficiently encode images – Applies different rates of compression depending on the PPI of the user devices. For example, ImageEngine adapts and more aggressively compresses on higher PPI devices without losing visual quality.
  • Next-gen format conversion – Automatically converts images to the optimal next-gen format according to the browser, device, or OS. ImageEngine can convert images to WebP or JPEG-2000 as well as GIFs to MP4 or WebP.  AVIF is also available in a manual directive mode.
  • Strip unnecessary metadata

While these features are standard for most image CDNs, ImageEngine is unique for its use of WURFL device detection. This gives ImageEngine much deeper insight into the user device accessing a website page and, by extension, its images. Using the screen size, resolution, PPI, etc., ImageEngine can make more intelligent decisions regarding how to reduce image payloads while maintaining visual quality.

This is why ImageEngine brands itself as an “intelligent, device-aware” image CDN and why it can reduce image payloads by as much as 80% (if not more).

ImageEngine also provides a proprietary CDN service to accelerate image delivery. The CDN consists of 20 globally positioned PoPs with the device-aware logic built-in. This allows you to deliver image content faster in different regions while also serving images straight from the cache with a ~98% hit ratio.

ImageEngine also supports Chrome’s save data setting. If someone has a slow connection or has activated this setting, ImageEngine will automatically compress image payloads even more, to provide a better user experience on slower connections.

How to Use ImageEngine with WordPress and Elementor

If you’re using WordPress and Elementor, then chances are you want to spend as little time on development and other technicalities as possible. Luckily, ImageEngine is a highly streamlined tool that requires little to no effort to integrate or maintain with a WordPress site.

Assuming you already have a WordPress website with Elementor, here are the step-by-step instructions to use ImageEngine:

  1. Go to ImageEngine.io and sign up for a 30-day free trial.
  2. Provide ImageEngine with the URL of the website you want to optimize.
  3. Create an account (or sign up with your existing Google, GitHub, or ScientiaMobile account).
  4. Provide ImageEngine with the current origin where your images are served from. If you upload images to your WordPress website as usual, then that means providing your WordPress website address again.
  5. Finally, ImageEngine will generate an ImageEngine delivery address for you from where your optimized images will be served. This typically takes the form of: {randomstring}.cdn.imgeng.in. You can change the delivery address to something more meaningful from the dashboard, such as myimages.cdn.imgeng.in.

Now, to set up ImageEngine on your WordPress website:

  1. Go to the WordPress dashboard and head to Plugins -> Add New.
  2. Search for the “Image CDN” plugin by ImageEngine. When you find it, install and activate the plugin.

  1. Go to Settings -> Image CDN. OK, so this is the ImageEngine plugin dashboard. To configure it, all you need to do is:

a. Copy the delivery address you got from ImageEngine above and paste it in the “Delivery Address” field.

b. Tick the “Enable ImageEngine” box.

That’s literally it. All images that you use on your WordPress/Elementor pages should now be served via the ImageEngine CDN already optimized. 

ImageEngine is largely a “set-it-and-forget-it” tool. It will provide the best results in auto mode with no user input. However, you can override some of ImageEngine’s settings from the dashboard or by using URL directives to manipulate images.

For example, you can resize an image to 300 px width and convert it to WebP by changing the src attribute like this:

<img src="https://myimages.cdn.imgeng.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/banner-logo.png?imgeng=/w_300/f_webp">

However, use this only when necessary, as doing so will limit ImageEngine’s adaptability under different conditions.

What Improvement Can You Expect?

Let’s see what results you can expect from using an image CDN to improve your page loading times.

For this, I created two identical WordPress pages using the Elementor theme. The one page purely relied on WordPress and Elementor, while I installed and set up ImageEngine for the other. The page had some galleries as well as full-size images:

The pages used many high-quality images, as you might expect to find on a professional photography gallery, photography blog, stock photo website, large e-commerce site, etc. I then ran page performance tests using Chrome’s built-in Lighthouse audit tool, choosing scores representing the average results I got for each page.

For thoroughness, I tested both the mobile and desktop performance. However, I focused on the mobile results as these showcase more of the image CDN’s responsive capabilities. Mobile traffic also accounts for the majority share of internet traffic and seems to be the focus for search engines going forward.

So, first of all, let’s see the mobile score for the page without ImageEngine:

As you can see, there was definitely a struggle to deliver the huge amount of image content. Google has shown that 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than 3s to load. So, clearly, this page has major concerns when it comes to user experience and retaining traffic.

The desktop version fared much better, although it still left much to be desired:

When digging into the reasons behind the slowdown, we can identify the following problems:

Most of the issues related somehow to the size and weight of the images. As you can see, Lighthouse identified a 3.8 MB payload while the total image payload of the entire page was close to 40 MB.

Now, let’s see what kind of improvement ImageEngine can make to these issues by looking at the mobile score first:

So, as you can see, a major improvement of 30 points over the standard WordPress/Elementor page. The time to load images was cut down by roughly 80% across the key core web vital metrics, such as FCP, LCP, and the overall Speed Index.

In fact, we just reached that critical 3s milestone for the FCP (the largest element on the visible area of the page when it initially loads), which creates the impression that the page has finished loading and will help you retain a lot of mobile traffic.

The desktop score was also much higher, and there was further improvement across the key performance metrics.

If we look at the performance problems still present, we see that images are almost completely removed as a concern. We also managed to bring down the initial 3.8 MB payload to around 1.46 MB, which is a ~62% reduction:

An unfortunate side effect of using WordPress and WordPress plugins is that you will almost inevitably face a performance hit due to all the additional JavaScript and CSS. This is part of the reason why we didn’t see even larger improvements. That’s the price you pay for the convenience of using these tools.

That being said, the more images you have on your pages, and the larger their sizes, the more significant the improvement will be.

It’s also worth noting that lazy-loaded images were loaded markedly faster with ImageEngine if you quickly scroll down the page, again making for an improved user experience.

Thanks to its intelligent image compression, there was also no visible loss in image quality, as you can see from this comparison:

Conclusion

So, as you can see, we can achieve significant performance improvements on image-heavy websites by using the ImageEngine image CDN, despite inherent performance issues using a CMS. This will translate to happier users, better search engine rankings, and an overall more successful website.

The best part is that ImageEngine stays true to the key principles of WordPress. You don’t have to worry about any of the nuts and bolts on the inside. And, ImageEngine will automatically adjust automation strategies as needed, future-proofing you against having to occasionally rework images for optimization.

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