The Cloudflare Images service comes in response to something that’s always true when it comes to the Internet: people want visuals. If you’re selling products, consumers want to know exactly what those products look like. Your website must be attractive and visually interesting. Apps must similarly be well-designed. And users expect all of this at lightning speeds regardless of their Internet connections. It’s a lot to expect!
You may already be familiar with some pitfalls of the visual Internet. You need to take or purchase photos, crop and edit them, upload them to your website, and optimize them to boot. It’s a process that can be as time-consuming as it is monotonous. While you cannot get around the need for images on your app or website, there is a new option that might lighten your load.
Introducing Cloudflare’s All-In-One Image Service: Cloudflare Images
Cloudflare recently announced a new service, Cloudflare Images, which is a streamlined image storage, resizing, optimizing, and delivery service that just became available for everyone. It’s the counterpart to Stream, a similar service for videos that the CDN has offered for the last three years. You might already be familiar with Cloudflare if you use the service for your website’s security, but the company continues to roll out new products for an ever-changing Internet.
Cloudflare Images is especially useful for companies with apps and online retail spaces, but developers will also find the new service to be quite useful. Employing a service like this allows companies to reduce the size of apps, making them more appealing to consumers. And those websites with hundreds or potentially hundreds of thousands of product images will benefit from reliable image hosting, even when receiving potentially unexpected traffic spikes. We’re all familiar with websites that have gone down after being mentioned in a TV show (think the “Colbert Bump”) or featured on the social media channel of a powerful influencer or celebrity.
A company’s success shouldn’t spell the kiss of death for its website, costing you potentially hundreds of new customers in the process.
How You Can Save Time and Money With Cloudflare Images
Of course, this surface may sound too good to be true, especially to those people who have paid the price for resource usage due to increased traffic. Fortunately, Cloudflare promises a simple pricing scheme for its Images service. Tiers are based on every 100,000 images, which can be up to 10 megabytes each. And if you’re worried about setup, the company promises that its API is incredibly reliable and straightforward. This ultimately saves businesses time that could be better spent improving the products or services they offer to their customers.
If you have little time to spare as is, you’ll be happy to learn that you can further save time thanks to Cloudflare Images putting multiple functions in one service. Although Cloudflare’s original service works for server images to users of your website or app, you would have to resize and store them separately from the CDN. A unique image ID can be altered to serve image variants such as those of different sizes without needing to create multiple files, store them in various folders, or worry about accidentally overwriting an image. That’s the real draw of Cloudflare Images and one that business owners would be wise to heed. Think of everything you could do if Cloudflare does it all for you. What kind of time or money could you save?
When it comes to cost savings, Cloudflare Images offers another benefit: you won’t have to pay to move images between one cloud service to another. If you’ve ever had to pay to move images between a host, resizing service, and content delivery network, you know how quickly those costs can add up. Some of Cloudflare’s clients report spending tens of thousands of dollars monthly on these costs alone. And if you’ve had to expand your budget to cover storing more images and videos as your product grows, you’ll similarly appreciate your images having a permanent home once and for all.
Finally, your users will thank you for using Cloudflare Images – at least, they would if they knew what had changed behind the scenes–because the service performs image optimization automatically. Whether consumers log onto your site from mobile or desktop or accesses your app, the service offers up the most ideal image for the situation. While your users may not know what a CDN is or understand the difference between Cloudflare’s image variants and static files, they may very well notice how much more quickly your website loads!
If you’re thinking about giving it a try, you’re in luck as Cloudflare Images just became available to everyone. Click Here to learn more about getting started! And if you’re looking for some other means to enhance your online presence, take a look at our handpicked list of 26 digital marketing tools to scale your business!
