Before delving into why you need a good image CDN provider for your e-commerce store, we should learn some basics first. Have you ever happened to experience the slow-loading web page of any e-commerce store or for that matter, any website? Yes, it’s a common thing we all experienced. It happens when the website runs on the traditional standard model where all the files are stored on a single server at a single specific location and when there is a surge in demand for the content from the users from different locations the server fails to deliver fast. Therefore the solution came into existence and that is CDN – Content Delivery Network. CDN came into being in the 1990s to remove the performance hurdles and make the internet faster and high-performing for enterprises as well as the end-users.
A CDN is a network of proxy servers along with their data centers located in the different parts of the world. CDN helps the websites to quickly deliver the data to their users from the nearby servers located across the globe.
Today, the internet is being used to access various web objects in addition to the text such as graphics, software, and applications. The very large portion of this huge data flow is being handled by CDN to make the user experience lively.
CDN has cached versions of data stored at different nodes worldwide that is at the multiple points of presence (PoPs) and delivers the demanded data from the CDN node close to the end-user.
Image CDN is a must for e-commerce stores
The e-commerce stores are graphics-heavy websites and have thousands of products listed on the online portal with high-quality images. A single server in a standard website model cannot efficiently cater to the vast user base spread geographically and hence an Image CDN for e-commerce store will be of immense help. However, image CDN differs from the standard CDN in many aspects.
Most CDNs would be just sending images from the CDN nodes to the edge servers whilst the Image CDN would perform extra tasks other than quickly delivering images such as optimizing image size to fit it to all kinds of devices used for accessing the webpage or the application.
The studies show that an Image CDN helps to have 40 to 80% savings in image file size. Therefore, selecting a good Image CDN provider for your e-commerce store should be given importance if you want to grow in today’s ever-evolving market.
How Image CDN Works
As we all know, a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers linked together and located in a different part of the world, and therefore it can deliver as quickly as possible. For reliable connectivity and speedy delivery of the content, the servers are placed at Internet exchange points (IXPs) between the networks. The different internet providers connect to the IXPs for accessing traffic originated from the networks. Once you opt for CDN, a cached version of your data will be saved on the different globally located servers and therefore the demanded web data can be loaded fast. The presence of CDN globally reduces the distance between website resources and the end users by fetching data from the closest data center. This ensures high speed and reliable delivery of the content. When it comes to an image CDN, a few extra things are taken care of when the demand is raised for the image or data of particular product listed on e-commerce store before fetching requested image or that data to the user’s device, such as –
Device Detection
Users can use different devices to purchase products on an e-commerce store. And therefore, the first and foremost task of any Image CDN is to detect the user’s device, its specification, and other capabilities so that a compatible image with proper quality and size can be delivered. Hence, device detection will be a primary task of the image CDN provider for an e-commerce store.
Image Optimization
Optimizing image files according to the specification of the requesting device is the next step. The large original images are resized, compressed, and converted into a suitable format.
Content Delivery though CDN:
After detecting the device and optimizing the image, the CDN then sends the image from the edge servers closest to the user. In this process, the optimized image is cached so that if the same user requests the same again the CDN quickly sends the cached copy of that image. For this reason, the image CDN helps the web page of the e-commerce store load relatively faster.
Benefits of opting for Image CDN
Opting for an image CDN benefits in many ways. The e-commerce sites generally have rich graphics including a myriad of images. The slow-loading web page can frustrate the customers and increase the drop-off rate. It’s a proven fact that the Image CDN helps e-commerce store in following ways –
- Faster loading of web-pages
- Protect e-commerce sites from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
- Lessen the huge load on the website’s main servers
- Saves money that e-commerce sites pay for processor usage and server bandwidth.
Why should e-commerce stores go for Image CDN
The straight answer is – the e-commerce store must go for an Image CDN when the websites become slow.
The studies have shown that more than 53% of the users abandon a mobile web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
When the images on the webpage are larger in size, they take a longer time to load especially on mobiles. The online portals of the e-commerce stores generally have thousands of images, the websites are dynamic and graphics-heavy, the customers are spread globally and most of them use the mobile network to access the online stores. In this scenario, the product images should be quickly downloaded otherwise the user would leave the process without checking out the product and final payment. Here only Image CDN is the last resort.
What should you look at while choosing an Image CDN
Since the Image CDN has become a necessity for e-commerce stores in today’s complex interconnected world, so many players have come up on the scene to cater to the huge demand. While choosing Image CDN you should look at the following things and select the right image CDN provider for your e-commerce store to fulfill your requirements.
Metrics and Data
Keeping in mind the fact that today we have increasingly complex digital infrastructure made up by the modern graphics-heavy websites, we need to look at some of the important metrics of a CDN provider. DNS time, connect time, wait time, throughput, and traceroutes are some major metrics that should be looked at while choosing an Image CDN apart from the other important factors.
Some CDNs will have complex DNS setup and hence can slow down the delivery of images. A CDN should have no packet loss as well as low latency along with reliable network connectivity. Wait time will show you if there are any potential capacity issues with the CDN. Throughput of the CDN test should always be higher than the origin in any case. You can also run the traceroutes to make sure you are not mapped to the wrong place.
Access to control panel
Generally, the CDN providers grant control panel access from where you can track the Cache Hit / Miss ratio. A CDN architecture that doesn’t come to the origin frequently is preferred.
Types of Image CDNs
There are two categories of Image CDNs. One is Self-managed Image CDNs which is best suitable for the websites with their own engineers to take care of their own infrastructures. Another one is Third-party Managed Image CDNs that manage the complete infrastructure and technology. The first type of Image CDN doesn’t provide you great features like the other one. The third-party managed image CDN is simple to start with.
You should also keep an eye on
The Image CDNs will differ in their features. Some will provide more while some less. The other factors you should also check for before zeroing on one particular service provider can be service cost, availability of dedicated support, and the ease of setup or migration.
Also, make sure the Image CDN you prefer will be faster than the origin server, will be able to deliver different sizes of images, small to large quickly, and the most important factor is that the chosen Image CDN should be able to reduce latency to minimize the geographical impact.
Closing words
Besides the metrics and major factors mentioned above, you need to ask yourself if the chosen Image CDN will improve your performance in the market. Also, you need to quantify that improvement in percentage so that it will be easy to keep track of ROI. Tata Tele Business Services, Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, and Imagekit are some of the leading examples of Image CDN provider for e-commerce stores and other graphics-heavy websites and they offer great features such as Integration with the existing infrastructure, Automatic image optimization, real-time watermarking, and resizing of images, continuous performance monitoring, and reasonable pricing.
A good image CDN is therefore required to deliver impressive and reliable web experience to the customers and better, faster, and cost-effective services to the e-commerce stores.
