Get Closer to Your Customers with Web Optimization
Nowadays, brands’ websites in the same industry compete against each other.
Brands aim to show their customers the most relevant content on their websites in the best possible way.
Websites that focus on increasing the user experience are constantly renewing themselves.
Brands are optimizing websites to increase efficiency. More optimized sites allow visitors to recognize the brand more strongly. This way, it helps to increase the interest in the products of the brand.
What is Web Optimization?
Web optimization is the process of always increasing the experience of existing and potential users of the website.
The rapid change in internet technology has made it necessary to keep website optimization up to date.
Website optimization may vary depending on the behavior of visitors and the content. This optimization, which is directly related to your page structure, requires serious planning. Determining what can be done will show how successful the optimization will be.
Website managers who care about web optimization can prohibit losing the interest of the visitors by optimizing the website, thus keeping its performance high.
Therefore, it is important that follow closely the constantly renewing internet technology and implement applicable work through research.
What is Image Optimization on Website?
Image optimization is the process of using website images in the best possible way.
Fast changes over the Internet technology can cause changes in your images as well as in other content on the website.
For your images to keep up with these developments, you should follow the optimization upgrowth closely.
Old generation visual structures that cannot keep up with these developments can negatively affect the user experience.
That’s why it would be appropriate to give the greatest importance to the optimization process that can be done on your images while optimizing your website.
What Does Image Optimization Do?
Image optimization ensures that your images are answered in the fastest and the most convenient way to the end-user. Your images, which take on a search-engine-friendly structure, also will improve the size of your website by decreasing it.
Image optimization, which provides to protect the image quality with fewer dimensions, provides a reduction in the total size of the website. This makes it easier for your website to be crawled by search engine algorithms.
Websites that are quickly crawled may have a higher chance of appearing in higher rankings on search engine results pages. Web optimization generally positively affects SEO performance.
In this way, it increases the likelihood of an increase in traffic to your website.
Web Optimization Becomes Easy with Merlin CDN
Merlin CDN includes many features to provide web optimization. From the moment you start using Merlin CDN service, it can provide your website optimization with a few clicks.
You can contribute to your website optimization using various features and different methods.
With no more than a few clicks, you can start the time-consuming optimization process.
You can use these features of the Merlin CDN service, which helps to increase the performance of your images, included in every monthly plan and "pay as you go" option.
You can see the features of the Merlin CDN service in the next headings of the article.
Image ReSize & Crop
With this feature of Merlin CDN, you can easily resize or crop your images.
You can instantly resize or crop your JPEG or PNG files as they respond to your Static Distributions.
You can easily do this from the "Image Resize & Crop" tab in the "Configurations" section on your administration panel.
You can use the resizing and cropping feature with Merlin CDN, which makes a noticeable contribution to your web optimization.
Image Quality
With this feature, you can adjust the quality of your images and ensure that your images are answered at the quality value you specify. You can give quality value to your images by using any value between 0 and 100.
In general, a value of 90 or higher is not recommended. The reason for this is that images with high value take longer to transmit to the user since the size gets bigger.
If you want, you can choose the Quality value of your image as 0 from the Merlin Panel and keep the image at the original quality.
Brotli
Brotli is an algorithm developed to compress the file sizes of websites more. Brotli can compress and shrink your files faster and make data transfers faster.
Brotli, which comes after GZIP technology, is again an algorithm developed by Google.
If we briefly list the benefits:
- It provides faster compression.
- Brotli has enhancements regarding the cybersecurity of data.
- It prevents excessive traffic consumption. It helps in balancing your traffic.
- It has a faster opening rate compared to LZMA implementation.
Brotli, which is currently in development on Merlin CDN, will soon join other features.
Thus, Merlin CDN will include another feature that contributes to web optimization within the CDN service.
GZIP
GZIP is a server-side-enabled file format, software for compression and decompression. This software provides drastic reductions in size by further compressing HTML, style, and JavaScript files.
A size reduction of approximately 70% can be seen in files with GZIP on them.
Thanks to Merlin CDN, site administrators can start using GZIP compression by activating it with a simple button on the administration panel. So, you can see a significant size reduction on your site.
With these features that you can have with Merlin CDN service, start your web optimization with a free $10 credit and start trying Merlin CDN right away.
WebP Format Developed by Google
The images on websites can transfer a message expressed by hundreds of words to the site visitors at a glance. These images, in which colors, icons or elements are used, positively affect the web design.
Also the size of these images is one of the main factors affecting the total size of the website. Hence, the image size is one of the first criteria to be checked in the site optimization.
By the way you can also take a look at our other blog article “Web Hosting vs. CDN Service”.
Importance of Image Size In Websites
The images of website are one of the main factors affecting the total size of your website. For this reason, it is important to optimally adjust the size of images on your website.
On the other hand, the size of the images directly affects the page speed as well. HD and large-sized images positively affect the web design. However, slow page speed due to large-sized images negatively affects the user experience.
Therefore, site images should be configured as high quality and reduced-size as possible.
It is important to have high quality content to provide a good user experience. But, at the same time it is important to have high page speed.
What is WebP?
WebP is an SVG vector format which makes reduced-size and high quality images by compressing them by more than 30%. It was developed by Google in 2010 and stands for “Web Pictures”. It is colloquially pronounced as “Weppy”.
Google put Page-Speed into service for its visitors in 2009. With this tool, Google stated that they consider the optimization of websites as significant. WebP, which was put into service one year after Page-Speed, has attracted great attention.
This has been a good news for both website owner and digital marketing specialists. Many website owners are using WebP format to optimize their sites.
If you want to convert your images into WebP format with a few clicks without any extra process on the image and benefits from CDN service as well, you can start using Merlin CDN with 10$ free credit.
What are the main features of WebP?
Unlike JPG, PNG and GIF, WebP images take a small spaces on the website. It can be compressed to almost 1/3 the size of other formats. In this way, it positively affects the site optimization.
WebP format, which is more adaptable to new technologies, was also put into service for VP8 video format. Therefore it not only minify the image size but also the video size.
For detailed information about WebP format, you can check out the WebP article of Google.
What are the advantages of WebP format?
There are many advantages of WebP which was developed to convert high-quality images into minimum dimensions.
First of all, you can easily convert any JPG, PNG and GIF files into WebP format. So, you can make the image conversion any time you need.
WebP is supported on typical browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera. So this format provides you with a wide range of uses. In addition to the browsers, it is supported by many other tools and software libraries.
If you convert all the images on your site to WebP format, you can observe a decrease in the size of your site. So, website load speed gets faster by means of its small size.
You can improve your SEO performance. On the other hand, there will be an acceleration in roaming of your visitors within the website. So they can have a better user experience.
What are the disadvantages of WebP format?
Although WebP is supported on most of the browsers, there are many image processing tools that don’t support it. And this developing image format is not currently used in tools such as Adobe Photoshop.
WebP plugin is supported on these apps: Pixelmator, ImageMagick, Leptonica and XnConvert.
Also WebP format requires a plugin to convert images on some browsers. They can not be opened on some browsers without plugin.
How does Merlin CDN convert images to WebP format?
You can serve your contents with WebP format on CDN servers with a few clicks. Once you activate the WebP format on management panel, Merlin CDN servers convert your images into WebP format on-the-fly when they receive them from your origin server.
While your contents are transmitted to CDN servers in different formats such as JPEG, PNG, the conversion is automatically made during transmission. Your images in WebP format are transmitted to all our CDN servers in this format.
In this way, you can achieve an increase on website speed by using WebP images on CDN servers.
And you can improve your SEO performance by responding the incoming requests with CDN servers. Your content goes to the CDN server geographically closest to the request, thus you can get a good user experience.
In this way, website visitors will be more satisfied with the roaming of your site.
Convert Your Images to WebP Format with Merlin CDN
Firstly, “What is the WebP format?” Clarifying the question makes it easier to understand the feature better. WebP is a file format developed by Google.
While preserving the quality of the image, it also reduces the size of the image. Thus, while displaying your image on the website in high quality, you can also decrease the overall size of your website.
A smaller website loads faster, and you can provide a better user experience.
This format allows the image to take up approximately 26% less space than other image formats.
WebP, which can have a positive effect on your website speed, directly contributes to your SEO performance.