The Business Benefits of using Image CDN Published on: May 26, 2023
In today’s digital landscape, website speed plays a crucial role in user experience and business success. One way to optimize website performance is by using an Image CDN (Content Delivery Network) to ensure fast image loading. In this article, we will explore the non-technical business benefits of fast-loading images and why integrating an Image CDN can be a game-changer for your website.
Business Metrics
Reducing the time of image loading is part of the web performance of the website. So, let’s look at the specific metrics and how they would be affected.
Website traffic and engagement
You uncover new user segments when your website speed improves. The 20% of your visitors on low-end devices and slow Internet speed can now comfortably navigate through the pages and don’t need to look elsewhere.
Enhanced customer experience
No need to wait will turn your visitors into satisfied customers. That will lead to better figures in your retention, time on site, and basket size metrics.
Increased conversion rates
Recently, I was buying a new phone and was doing that on my old phone. I picked a model on the official website, then went to Google to check retail prices. It turned out to be the same price which happens often with electronic devices. So, I opened the first 5 search results and proceed to the first page. It didn’t load when I was there, so I went to the next tab, then next… Long story short I bought from the 4th search result.
The moral of the story: don’t let a slow website ruin all the work you put into SEO.
Reduced bounce rates
A user journey is typically spread over several pages. If any of the pages have poor performance or quality - there is a high chance of the visitor closing the tab and bouncing. It’s vital to keep high standards across all pages on the website.
Cost savings on bandwidth and server resources
Using Image Optimisation not only improves the UX but reduces your Internet Egress which saves you money. For instance, using the next-generation format AVIF will reduce your image size by 80%.
SEO and Web Vitals
Google is using Core Web Vitals metrics when ranking your website. Better numbers - higher position in Search. The suite consists of 3 metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay (getting replaced by Interaction to Next Paint), and Cumulative Shift Layout.
Improving the Largest Contentful Paint metric
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast a user could see the largest element on the page. Very often the largest element is a hero image, product image, or a banner. Therefore, loading images fast is essential for optimizing LCP metric.
If you can load the biggest image in under 2.5 seconds that’s considered a good result.
Technical benefits
Using Image CDN provides a lot of advantages to Development and Digital Teams. Let’s look at those.
Technology Updates
It might seem that not much happening in the “Images for Web” space, but it’s only on the surface. For instance, the latest update to libaom, AVIF encoder, made images up to 10% smaller keeping the same quality. So, all our clients got that improvement in 2 weeks without any work required on their side. Given that most likely your Team members are not focusing on image encoding there is a chance they could miss the update altogether.
Global Network
Leveraging Content Delivery Network gives you a cache that is close to the user’s location improves latency and provides redundancy. In addition, other network technologies are handy for Media Delivery. For instance, HTTP/3 eliminates round-trip for existing connections which makes your content load even faster.
Reliability and Cost
Image optimization is resource heavy workload that creates a lot of complexity when we talk about downtime and cost-effective scaling. Using Image CDN takes on those challenges and frees up your Team for delivering business value.
Easy Win
Image Optimisation with Image CDN becomes a low-cost-high-value improvement because it’s very easy to start using it. You can start optimizing images on your website in 10 minutes using this simple 5-step guide:
Conclusion
Integrating Image CDN with your website is not only driving your profit up but also reducing your cost and enabling your Team to focus on problems that your business solves. It is a Win-Win-Win situation!
Hope you enjoyed the read!