How an edge cloud helps you optimize your website performance

07/21/2020, 1:30 p.m.

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Different end devices and image-heavy websites affect performance and pose a great challenge for website operators. Read here which tool helps to fix these problems and get your site up and running for all devices.

Website performance, design and SEO – a dilemma?

It is now generally known that loading a website means cash. Numerous Studies have proven this in recent years. For example, 53 percent of mobile users jump off when the loading time of a website is over three seconds.

Google also wants to provide its users with results that perform satisfactorily and adequately. Website performance has therefore been a ranking factor for search results for several years. But now Google is going a step further: with the next update, which is to come in 2021, a positive user experience will be given a much higher priority, i.e. the loading time of your page will be even more important than it is already.

However, high demands from users and Google do not only apply to the speed of a website. Content and design are also becoming increasingly important in the competition for user attention and in SEO – and this on every type of device; whether desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

So that your content is optimally played on any device, there is now responsive web design that ensures a flexible layout of your website. However, what guarantees an optimal user experience on all devices on one side presents web content developers with a dilemma:

Actually, you would have to provide optimized images for a large selection of different layouts to avoid the transfer of unnecessary amounts of data. This means not only a lot of work, but also high additional costs. Because these pictures would all have to be pre-calculated and saved on your server.

Fastly: A modern edge cloud platform

The good news is: You don’t have to choose between performance, (responsive) design and revised developers. Because there are technical possibilities to solve these challenges.

One offers extensive options for optimizing website performance Edge cloud platformas Fastly offers. The Edge Cloud consists of globally distributed servers that are located at strategic points on the Internet and can therefore communicate with the end devices of the users with minimal latency. The principle of content delivery networks (CDN) is known, in which the static content of a website can be cached and thus delivered more quickly. Also Fastly offers this content delivery, but goes beyond that. By allowing program logic to run on the edge cloud, more and more developers are moving parts of their architecture to where it can work most efficiently: close to the user. These can be security functions, load balancing, the orchestration of other CDNs, but also the optimization of image content.

In most cases, images make up a large part of the data volume. Of the Image Optimizer (IO) is therefore a function of the edge cloud from which many website operators can benefit. If the IO is used, only the original image must be saved in full resolution on the own server. Because the IO caches, i.e. stores images and then delivers them, perfectly tailored, edited and pixel-perfect to each individual user – each optimized for the device on which the website is opened.

The implementation is super simple, time and labor saving. Instead of a complex pre-calculation, it is enough to append parameters to the URL of the respective image and the Image Optimizer adjusts quality, size and format fully automatically – and thus takes the strain off servers and relaxed developers. You can find out how this works in this Online demo easy to understand, which shows you the URL and the file size of the delivered image.

Online shops can, for example, reduce the amount of data in their images to a minimum without the quality perceived by the user suffering. The IO is not only interesting for shop operators and can also make other changes to the image in addition to size, quality and format: The Guardian For example, the IO used to put an indication of the age of the article over every article picture that is older than one year – to avoid fake news and renewed excitement topics.

Want to know how an edge cloud platform and the Image Optimizer can improve your website performance? Then contact Fastly and get one from their experts free report in which you can find out how much bandwidth you could save by using the IO.

Request your free report