Delivering a consistently positive user experience is crucial for website and application owners. To keep your visitors satisfied, and therefore loyal, your web content delivery must remain fast, seamless—and reliable.
And this is especially true when it comes to online images. As soon as we anticipate seeing an image on our device, we expect that image to be delivered fully-optimized for our viewing. E-commerce companies, personal and corporate blogs, and product websites all contain tons of images—imagery that all of us want served up quickly, and in the best possible quality.
A properly configured CDN can easily accelerate the static (and sometimes dynamic) content of your website, but having enhanced optimization and content processing capabilities would truly level up the delivery of your website images.
Introducing Image Stack
With Image Stack, an impressive, brand-new function of our Edge Network, you can now optimize your website images on the fly. It will make your pages load faster, simplify site management procedures, and save money by reducing the overall CDN traffic.
There are four main functionality tools within Image Stack:
- WebP, AVIF image compression. Delivers your PNG or JPG as high-fidelity and lightweight WebP/AVIF images to your end-user devices. Compressing images in WebP or AVIF formats could deliver up to 85% file size savings at a given quality level.
- Image quality settings. Allows you to set the quality level for your website images, thereby controlling the webpage load speed and the amount of transmitting CDN traffic.
- Image resizing tool. Allows you to reduce the height, width, and scale of your original image by adding just a few query strings.
- Image cropping tool. Allows you to cut off the excessive image area beyond the established parameters and deliver it to the users.
We have huge plans for building out this set of tools, so additional functionalities will be added to Image Stack in the days to come.
Everything happens in the cloud
All the image transformations take place on our network servers, so you don’t need to worry about hardware investments or CPU provisioning.
Image Stack pulls the original image from your origin server to Image Processor, our dedicated edge cluster. With its additional computational resources, Image Processor performs the commands you’ve previously applied. After that, all our caching servers will only receive processed copies (with the given size, format, and quality level) of the image without requesting the original one.
Deliver fast-loading images and achieve better SEO
Making a website faster is one of the main reasons for employing a CDN. With its new set of image optimization features, Image Stack by Gcore CDN makes it easier even if your website strongly relies on image galleries and hi-res product pictures. Your website pages will load faster and your visitors will have a consistently better user experience. This positively affects search ranking positions, as well as the overall business metrics of your web service.
Simplify website maintenance and reduce costs
Image Stack’s Resize and Crop features can simplify image management and reduce website operational costs. You’ll spend less time and effort adapting your original image to the final website design or user devices. For example, if you have an online store with thousands of product images, you don’t need to do a pre-upload image resizing. With Image Stack, you could specify the right size by adding a query string to the image URLs and your users will get resized images from our edge servers.
Image compression and crop/resize functionality can noticeably reduce the traffic volume coming from the edge servers to users, so it decreases the overall amount of money you need to pay for using a CDN service. This could be extremely beneficial for image-rich resources like online shops, marketplaces, and photo banks.
Getting started with Image Stack
Image Stack is a paid option of the Gcore CDN product. It charges you per each image regardless of what kind of operation and how many transformations you’ve made: compressing, resizing, cropping, or quality changing. Transformation of 100,000 images is included in each CDN plan, and every additional 10,000 requests will cost you €1.
To activate this feature in your account, please contact the account manager or our support team.
Learn more in Gcore Knowledge Base:
