Cloudinary Blog

Archive for 2016 - Page 4

Optimizing web performance and your bottom line

By Robert Moseley
Optimize your website and app for maximum user engagement
Patience is not a virtue for website visitors and online shoppers. Every fraction of a second counts when it comes to keeping – or losing – a visitor to your website.  
 
Loading time is a major contributing factor to page abandonment, according to an infographic on the Kissmetrics blog using statistics from Akamai and Gomez. Because the average web visitor has no patience for a page that takes too long to load, abandonment increases as a percentage with every second of load time. Nearly 40 percent of users will abandon a page after 3 seconds, the blog noted. Mobile Internet users probably experience the most frustration with this issue –  73 percent noted that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load. 
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Is your website offering the best user experience?
 
The most common frustrations voiced by people when visiting a website are the time it takes for pages to load and the amount of bandwidth some sites eat from their monthly mobile plans. 
 
What these users might not realize is that, in many cases, the culprit is the same: website image performance. Ensuring images are optimized is particularly important to businesses who manage these sites since they account for the majority of the downloaded bytes on a web page, and can slow down load times considerably. 
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Improve your site with content personalization & A/B testing

Personalization of web content is becoming increasingly important for businesses to gain – and maintain – their competitive advantage. Web personalization is key to increasing conversion rates and return rates, as well as boosting retention, time-on-site, and page views, according to a December 2015 VentureBeat study, which noted that 87 percent of companies have seen a lift of at least 5 percent in their most important metrics as a result of personalization. 
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Dynamic ZIP files generation with a single line of code

As a developer, you want to allow your users to download multiple files in a single click. An easy way to download multiple files and share them is to generate a ZIP file. When images are involved, you may also want to normalize the original images before including them in the ZIP file, by scaling them down to the same maximum resolution or converting them to the same format.

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How mindbodygreen reduce costs & save development time

mindbodygreen is a digital media brand dedicated to health and wellness. The company’s website bring together leaders in the wellness world, best-selling authors, fitness experts, trusted healers, pioneering doctors, top chefs, celebrities and top-tier journalists to provide readers fresh, expert content and tools to help them live healthy, happy lives. The company was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y. 
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Why JPEG is like a photocopier

By Jon Sneyers
Why JPEG is like a photocopier (generation loss)

If you make a copy of a copy of a copy, the quality will deteriorate with every ‘generation’. This problem is called ‘generation loss’. It is not difficult to understand why this happens with actual copier machines. Scanning and printing are not perfect, being based on noisy sensors and physical paper and ink, and the resulting noise will tend to accumulate.

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Apply conditions to dynamically manipulate images.

It's great to have the capability to manipulate images on the fly by using dynamic URLs to customize the images to fit the graphic design of your site or mobile application. However, what if you want to manipulate an image depending on a specific image characteristic (like its width or aspect ratio) or its contents (does it contain a face?). What you need is a way to apply a transformation to an image only if a specific condition is met. Take for example a situation where you have allocated space on your page for a user uploaded image with a width and height of 200 pixels. Furthermore, if the image contains a face you would like to zoom in and focus on the face itself, otherwise you would like to fit the entire image into the available space:

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