DEV Community: Burak

Which do you prefer to use image optimization or video streaming tool? Why?

Burak — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 23:34:06 +0000

What is a GIF and How To Use It Properly On Your Website?

Burak — Sat, 30 May 2020 15:16:03 +0000

What is a GIF?

In short, GIF is basically an image format which stands for “Graphics Interchange Format”. Usage of it gets popular in the recent years, especially for animation. But it was initially introduced 32 years ago in 1987. By the time the main difference GIF brings to the industry is that, it enable users to have animated images. Which is not the main point behind the format during the development phase, their main purpose is to serve multiple images in single image format by creating better compression. By the time it turned into "GIF animation". However, initially it had few flaws. Firstly, it allowed only 256 different colors. To compare it with the general RGB channeled images, each channel contains 256 different colors. So, this caused quality issues when the GIF animation color changes quickly. Like many image formats it evolved through time and currently GIF animations do support even transparency channel. But by the time it doesn’t get replaced by any other format, which is the general behavior observed throughout the industry. Reasons behind that are actually simple,

Compatibility, Marketing and Content Consumption Trends

When the gif introduced, it is designed as an image format. This turned out to be a great time advantage for it. Because in HTML, <img> tag was introduced in 1992. On the other hand, <video> tag was introduced in 2007. Which is the common tag that was used by many of the alternatives such as WebM, mp4 and so on. But it is also important to mention that <img> tag is not better than the <video> tag or vice-versa. They are just different tags used for different purposes.

For instance, <img> tag turns out to be the exact use case for the gif since it falls under the category of “image formats”. It delivers the fundamental requirement of displaying it, even if the GIF is animated. Also, it is important to add that, <img> tag also supports the mp4 extension. At this point you may ask, “Why does mp4 matter when compared to GIF?”. Well it does matter because,

a) GIF has lower-quality: The GIF format uses a compression method call “Lempel-Ziv Welch” which is not an optimal for lossless compression. Also, as we mentioned previously, gif format also uses a limited color space which in combination with LZW creates artifacts. Hence, low quality.

b) GIF has larger file size: In addition to the properties we mentioned above, the compression is done for every single frame, for each image. Unlike GIF, mp4 mainly uses H.264 compression which compresses the clip as a whole. Therefore, it is more efficient, effective and create smaller sized files.

From the reasons above many websites decided to do operations under the hood. Which can even consist of serving mp4 files in the <img> tag. Also, the way that they do it is very clever. Which is letting users upload GIF formatted files, then they convert the uploaded file to mp4 format in back-end. This process can be done easily via open source software like ffmpeg. After that, they either put mp4 formatted file to the <video> tag or <img> tag depending on the purpose. While choosing a tag, performance and user experience is generally the main concern.

Performance-wise, using <video> tag for GIF may decrease website performance therefore has a negative effect on SEO. For example, until the video is fully loaded, the window.load() function won’t be triggered, therefore causing delays. Yet worse, there are javascript players. If you embed video from a streaming or a video platform it generally ends up in this category and they may cause serious performance issues. On the other hand, this is not the case for the <img> tag. Also, at this point it is important to mention that, there are also combined use cases. For instance, when GIF animations are placed inside <img> tag which is nested in the <video> tag> and it does few things. Firstly, it creates much more redundant delivery medium. If for whatever reason the video cannot be loaded, the GIF can be served instead. In addition to that, the controls can be removed and the video can be looped. This also brings us to the next point while choosing tags, user-experience. You won’t be able to customize the playout in <img> tag. But contrarily, you can make customizations on your <video> tag. Those customizations can include but not limited to,

· Looping

· Auto-playing

· Muting

User-experience is one of the key factors that determine the way of delivery for gifs. To emphasize its importance, let’s look at some example situations.

1. Imagine you want your users to be able to download the content that you have put on your website. If you decide to deliver to content via <video> tag, it is much more difficult for users to download. Because unlike <img> tag, users won’t be able to save as usual. They need to download via a 3rd party software, or you will need to provide download mechanisms. Which is obviously additional work for such a simple task. Therefore using <img> tag makes more sense in this situation.

2. Imagine that your users don’t worry about downloading content from your site, rather they want to enjoy the content that you’ve share. In this case what you might want to do is deliver the content at perfect quality with sound and all of the engaging features. So, in this case delivering the content via <video> tag might make more sense.

As can be seen, the usage of GIF animations and other formats are heavily dependent on the use case, which can easily be understood by the vague examples given above.

However, thing mentioned above only set the scene for the gif format. Main usage increase came with the dynamic changes on the marketing and content consumption. The consumed content medium shifted towards to mini, muted and looping animations from written and other type of formats. This is because one simple reason, the ease of consumption. This actually is the main reason why GIF became a popular format.

To Conclude, without a doubt GIF is one of the most widely used formats out there and it keeps growing. This is the reason why, as image4io we decided to support it. Therefore, addition to the aforementioned delivery options, we add one more to it and improving the delivery performance even further.

Resources:

· https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/replace-animated-gifs-with-video

· https://cloudinary.com/blog/evolution_of_img_gif_without_the_gif

· https://rigor.com/blog/optimizing-animated-gifs-with-html5-video/

· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

· https://semgeeks.com/empower/how-animated-gif-emails-can-increase-your-conversion-rates/

What is the best alternatives of Cloudinary?

Burak — Sun, 17 May 2020 12:29:25 +0000

I can learn the best alternatives. You can share your experience.

Why the best alternative of Imgix is Image4io?

Burak — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 19:37:01 +0000

Did you know that according to The Atlantic - "People uploaded an average of 1.8 billion digital images every single day." and "Every two minutes, humans take more photos than ever existed in total 150 years ago". This fact alone shows us that as humans, we are creating extreme amount of content every single day and mind-blowing fact is that this article is from 2015. Think about the current situation now while keeping technological advancements in mind. Although it is amazing to have such massive amounts of content available, it is not perfect as it seems. It has a single and really important drawback of,

Distribution.

A lot of people like to share the images and pictures they had, rarely keeping for themselves. As a result, their first option is to use mainstream social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest etc. Although it is enough for some people, it is certainly not enough for everyone. People tend to create more personal spaces and even businesses out of their contents. This is the exact reason to create a website.
At first glance, creating a website looks simple but it is way complicated than it seems. The reasoning behind that is simple. We don't live in the 1990's anymore and reasonable amount of people have high-speed network connections. As a result, people want to access stuff that they want to see FAST. We are aforementioned that a lot of content is available on the internet, so every single day standing out becomes much more challenging task.
Now imagine a situation where you, as a visual content creator, have a website. You want to share your content, sell your merchandise and possibly make some profit. However, after you have uploaded you hundreds of your awesome creations, you noticed that your website took ages to load. Guess what would happen?
Everybody went to your website, think it is not loading and move on to the next one. No one is ever noticed your valuable content.
This happens to creators every single day, and even worse, as for the large businesses as well. Imagine the revenue loss they had every single day, because of a few seconds. To eliminate that issue, Content Delivery Network's (CDN's) must be implemented on websites. Since we have already explained the benefits of CDN's on the previous articles. We now move on to the available service providers in the industry.
When it comes to utilizing CDN's for image delivery Imgix is one of the services that is primarily used. But like in every product, all it comes to user preference. Website owners already dealing with a lot of plugins, frameworks, services etc. Adding new services into the common tech-stack is also unfavorable task. Also for cost efficiency it is generally not the optimal solution. So making the right choice is especially crucial, since it is difficult task to make changes and integrations on a website. To test the services of a website, what could be better than testing its own? Obviously, to keep it a fair comparison we would not be using our in-house developed speed test. Rather we use a third-party website called GTMetrix. It gives enough of a detail to make a comparison. But like in many comparisons, one source is not enought. So in addition to GTMetrix we include webpagetest.org 's webpage test as well. We feed both image4io and Imgix to it and the results are following,

As you can see, overall we deliver our homepage better in various aspects. And we also think that homepages can be good comparison tools for the software companies, especially if their service is related to it. If you don't experience top-notch performance at the homepage of the service provider, you should not be expecting from their service either if the content delivery networks and web-speed is the primary concern.
Unlike Imgix, we decided to 1-up our CDN solution and provide maximum for our customers and clients by including storage in our services too. So you will never need to separate your storage again, combined in only one step. This combination is solely designed and optimized for your flawless experience. Also, it is a major cost-cutting feature for our customers. Below you can see the pricing calculator and it is clearly shown that storage is one of the main expenses for the website. It is also important to mention that we use Amazon's S3 Storage Service pricing in our calculations since it is one of the mostly used storage services in the industry. Keep in mind that there are more costly and cost-efficient alternatives as well but logically this reflects to the service quality as well.
Like mentioned, we keep our prices as minimum as possible without sacrificing any quality. We always monitor our servers therefore we provide service continuously and minimizing downtime. If you are interested in pricing and interactive comparison you can always figure out yourself at our pricing calculator.

The aforementioned services are great on their own, but obviously not enough for us. We want our customers to have full control and flexibility over their needs. Without needing continuous support from others.
From this vision, we have implemented credit system in our service. So you can customize the service you want to have, according to your needs. It is separated into 3 parts where you can process your images, store them and deliver via CDN.
Only using image4io and nothing else.

This is the reason why we have satisfied customers which you can see it on here. And we left the one of the best parts at the end. You can immediately try image4io on your website without any cost at all.
If you have any doubts about integrations and migrations, we cot you covered. Again we want this process to be as smooth as possible for our clients. Therefore, you could always refer to these pages to get help.
We would gladly deliver your content as fast as possible while you focus on things that are really important.

Why do websites take so long to load?

Burak — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:33:57 +0000

Firstly you should check your website performance. You can use Google Page Insights. It presents a report related to your website. You can examine this error attentively. Then you start to solve this problem. Generally, image size or format causes this slow loading time. You should optimize your image, maybe use CDN. image4io can solve these problems. Because image4io is an image optimizer, using CDN, storage management. After you integrate to image4io, your website speed up seriously. Try it!

Why do webpages take so long to load even though I have fast internet?

Burak — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 11:40:23 +0000

Probably your problems are associated with the website’s content. Especially website images are really big problems. They cause the website to have low performance. You can use analytics tools. For example, Google Page Insights. It is a perfect analyze tool for websites. You should check the report that Google present to you. You see your website problem like this:

You should examine opportunities. Generally, essential problems are related to images like be in there. You should solve these problems. For this, there are several tools. For example: Cloudinary, image4io. Image4io is cheaper than Cloudinary. At the same time, its performance is similar to Cloudinary. image4io optimize your images, deliver with CDN, manager your storage. Your website speeds up maybe 4–5 seconds. It is a perfect saving.

2020 Web Performance Trends and Full Stack Solutions

Burak — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 11:28:33 +0000

The better, the faster your web performance and web speed are, the more successful the business you have. You can never expect your customers to be patient. In an internet business, every second matter. Here are some statistics showing this fact (1): if your website performance is only 2 seconds slow,

There will be 1.8% fewer queries for your website.
Clicks for your website will be reduced by 3.75%.
There will be 4% drop in customer satisfaction.
There will be 4.3% less in revenue. In addition to these statistics, a properly optimized website for a good performance rises conversation rate up to 16.07 % and order value up to 5.51 %. All these digits stress on importance of web performance and web speed. But, how can we improve web performance and web speed? These are 2020 web performance trends for faster websites and better business.

Image Optimization

The right image format is important (What is the best image format?
Every website has a right image format. So, adjust size and quality of your images, which will fit best for your website. You will see your web performance is faster and better.
Resizing and compressing images

Adapt your images’ size to server size. Compress your images, losing the least quality possible. You will see your website load time is lesser.

Responsiveness of your images

Your images’ sizes cannot be standard. They must fit into every gadget whether they are a computer, a tablet, or a mobile device. Responsiveness ensures you reach every customer.

CSS sprite will be good.

CSS sprite means collecting images in one file. With the help of this, many images will be downloaded like one single image. This undeniably diminishes load times.

CDN Usage

CDN is about the geographic distribution of servers for faster delivery (2). Your website visitors can have your website content from the nearest CDN server. This will increase web speed considerably. If you want to benefit from the advantages of CDN usage, your CDN settings should be properly configured. Configuring the CDN setting is almost impossible manually. A full-stack image optimizer will do this automatically for you. Taking into consideration your website properties, it will direct visitors to the nearest CDN server. As a result, you will have a better web performance.

Image CDN#

Image CDN means transforming, optimizing and delivering your images. With the help of this, you will have up to 80 % more web speed. Thanks to image CDN, your images will be always in the right form, size, and quality. These parameters quickly change according to different conditions and circumstances. An automatic configuration is also important here. A full-stack image optimizer will also do it for you in the best way. If you want to have more web performance and web speed, you should optimize your image CDN setting and use automatic full-stack optimizers.

Digital Asset Management

A digital asset signifies all of your files like video, image or other media. Your website will be full of digital assets. These assets have to be properly managed for an efficient website. Especially for web performance and web speed, digital asset management is of great importance. For proper digital asset management, the software is needed. This software will organize your digital more easily and enhance your web performance.

Minimizing HTTP Requests

Your website is congested with downloading elements such as stylesheets, flash and images. If you can minimize these elements, there will be fewer HTTP requests, which will make your website much faster.

A full-stack application will help you with all of these web performance trends. image4io offers you full-stack solutions for better web performance and web speed. Eventually, you will have a faster website, more satisfied customers and more revenue.

REFERENCES
(1)http://www.mcrinc.com/Documents/Newsletters/201110_why_web_performance_matters.pdf
(2)https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/

Web Speed Testing Tools

Burak — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 23:59:48 +0000

Web speed testing tools are tools used to measure the speed of websites. Before talking about the benefits and use of web speed testing tools, it would be more accurate to talk about what website speed is and its importance. So, what's the website speed? Why is it necessary for websites?

What Is Website Speed?

Today, with the development of the internet and technology intensively, the importance of web sites increases. In this respect, many people use websites extensively to reach their target audience. However, web sites must meet various requirements to achieve the required success. The first of these is the speed of websites. Because of the problems faced by internet users, the speed of the sites in question is in the first place. It also increases the bounce rate of late-loaded websites. When Internet users are unable to access their websites within a few seconds, they leave the site and visit other similar sites.
For this reason, the high speed of websites is essential for their clickability. Web site speed is critical in SEO, which is the most crucial factor that affects the clickability of websites. At this point, the question is how to measure the speed of the website. There are several ways to test the speed of websites. Let's go through this together.

How Is Website Speed Measured?

If you want your website to be loaded quickly, you need to follow the necessary steps. You must pay attention to The Points you receive, such as hosting service, image optimization, CDN usage, image format. Because these points directly affect the speed of websites. If you think your site is low in loading time, or if you have done several studies to upgrade your loading time to low, you can do web speed testing. Web speed has several test programs that you can use for testing. However, it is not possible to say that the web speed test tool can provide quality and accurate information. That is why it is vital to get help from a successful web site test tools for your web site. At image4io, we offer you the highest quality service to measure the speed of your website. So, What do we provide with the web speed test as image4io?

image4io What Does The Web Speed Test Offer?

At image4io, we provide you with the necessary information about whether your website is fast enough or not. It presents some
opportunities. With these results, you can make essential improvements to your website and make your site much more useful. When you test your website with image4io, you may experience the following concepts as a result.

Another website measure platform is Cloudinary. It has a webspeed test tool. It indicates your images size and size savings.

Download Speed

Download speed is a value that should be looked at when the internet speed is considered low. Upload speed shows how fast your
website can receive data from the internet.

Load Speed

If you use your website to upload something to the internet, not to download a file from the internet, then the upload speed should be checked. The higher your loading speed, the better. You can also measure the speed of your website with image4io and make various adjustments to your site with your results.

Why is image4io a good alternative for Cloudinary?

Burak — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 15:29:38 +0000

image4io is a website that provides customers and visitors with a variety of information about the speed at which websites uploaded. Cloudinary is also a company that offers services to its customers to ensure that their websites are loaded up much faster and used efficiently. In this context, before we talk about how image4io is an excellent alternative to Cloudinary, let's talk about why things like site upload speed, image optimization, and web performance are essential for websites.

Importance of Website Loading Time

In our social life, we have many situations where we have to endure, such as waiting for public transport, waiting in line at the bank, waiting for the plane at the airport, even though we don't want to. While we don't like to wait also to get our jobs done, seeing the web site that we click on while surfing the internet opens late will cause many people to experience a negative experience. A page that takes a long time to open causes us to close it immediately and consider other options. In this respect, we can mention that there are various effects on website speed. We can explain these effects as follows.

Impact of Website Speed On SEO

Google released a statement in 2010 regarding the effects of the speed of websites on SEO. In this respect, the slow or fast loading of web sites is of great interest to SEO. We know that site speed is now one of the ranking factors. In fact, according to some experts, site speed is one of the most critical issues of Google. (*)

Impact of Website Speed on User Experience

Research on the effects of website speed on the user experience found that due to the slow speed of the site, many users left the site without browsing the site. A survey conducted in the United States showed that 51 percent of online shoppers in the United States leave the site without purchasing a product if the site is slow to load. (*) Given this figure, which is too high for an e-commerce site, the number of potential missed customers is much higher than the number of earned customers! That is not only on e-commerce sites but also on sites that provide information. But don't let those numbers scare you. With image4io, you can learn the speed of your website and make various changes to increase speed. It is up to you to create a good experience for your visitors!

Why Do Websites Load Slowly?

As a result of your tests through image4io, you will be able to observe why your website loads slowly. In this respect, the reasons for the slow loading of web sites can be listed as follows.

Host

The host is the most critical factor affecting the speed of websites. In this respect, you can see if there is a problem with the host service you receive during your test through image4io.

Image Format / Image Optimization

image4io presents smart optimization solutions. It determines visitors’ browsers. Then image4io sends the fastest format to visitors. Thanks to that, visitors don’t wait to download images.

Design

The design of your website also directly affects the speed of your website. At some points, it would be more accurate to emphasize the Ease of use rather than visual appeal. With the tests offered by image4io, you can find out whether the slowness on your website is due to design.

Why Image4io?

image4io offers a testing method to help you understand why your website speed is slow and provide solutions to it. Using image4io, you can eliminate the problem by learning the source of the problem. It has easy integration and dashboard. You can control you images easily. Thanks to SEO tool your images are compatible SEO structure. image4io integrated with Zapier and Slack. You can use this channel and start to use image4io. They have a similar performance but image4io cheaper and faster than Cloudinary. You can sign up and use for free!

What is image optimization and why important for image SEO and websites?

Burak — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 13:50:31 +0000

Optimizing image, image optimizers, image performance and image processing are important components of website optimization today. Images are indispensable element of today’s website, but their huge size is a big problem for most website developers. They frequently have to sacrifice a beautiful design for the sake of load time.

The internet users have neither time nor patience to wait for the loading of a heavy sized image. When you think even a humble website contains tens of images, you can imagine the severity of the problem. Image optimization offers a solution to this problem in terms of both fast-loading websites and image SEO.

Facts

Some statistics tell these facts:

% 64 of all websites in the world consist of images.(*)
An average person would like to view a website in 2 seconds.(*)
53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load. (*)
Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9% while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%. Websites that load in five seconds average 70% longer sessions—translating to more conversions. In fact, a mere 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%.(*) This data alone is enough to show importance of handling images in websites, i.e. the necessity of image optimization and image optimizers. But what do these concepts mean?

What is image optimization?

It is the process of minimizing load time without losing significant quality by putting images into right size, dimension, resolution and format. You can carry out this process by compressing images. At that time, there is a risk of losing significant quality. Compressed images will not be attractive to viewers. Image optimization process offers automatic and manual solutions to both enhance image performance and minimize load time. It means that you can achieve an image optimization by resizing and serving images manually or using image optimizer. Image optimizer tools will help you greatly with handling a bulk of images.

Why is image optimization important for a website?

To understand this, first, we have to know the operation of a website. As we have said before, most of websites consist of images. When you visit a page on a website, these images have to be loaded to view this page. But if these images are not optimized, there will be two problems for their loading:

Size of images: For example, you take a photo and put it on website. Its dimensions are 2400 X 1350. Internet server’s dimensions are 300 X 169. This situation will definitely increase load time.(*)
Resolution of images: High resolution - images will definitely have more load time. So, for a faster loading, you have to resize and compress images without losing quality, and this is only possible with image optimization.

Why image optimization is important for image SEO?

Google never likes cumbersome websites, and if you optimize images, you will have faster load times. It means you will have high rankings in search engines. Resizing and compressing images will not be enough for optimization. You will also have to do these:

Giving the image a readable name
A descriptive alt tag will be good.
Arranging responsiveness images.(*)

What methods are there for optimizing images?

Firstly, we can divide these methods into two as lossless and lossy compression methods. In the lossless compression method, you do not lose any quality; however, load time is still slow. If your website gives more importance to quality, you should prefer this method. In the lossy method, you have less quality but faster load time. Another category is image scaling and resizing.

You can optimize images manually using these techniques and using tools like Photoshop. It is OK if your website has a couple of images. But what if you have e-commerce website with hundreds of images? At this point, automatic image optimizers play a role.

These tools will carry out all optimization in a short time. If you can have an image optimization tool which can handle all optimization process, i.e. determining a particular user’s image optimization needs, making optimization without quality loss and executing other optimization requirements, it will work best for you. We call such tools “full-stack image manager.”

image4io is the SaaS platform that provides performance, security, personalization, and perfecting tools for web-based images. You can optimize your website images, using image CDN and manage your storage. Your website bounce rate decreases and conversion rate increases. You can test your website on image4io webspeed test tool. image4io suggests some opportunities related to your website images. When you can apply these suggestions, your website speed up.