Everyone knows that images can bring life to your blog posts and landing pages. The problem is many people don’t optimise or compress their images, which slows down your loading time.
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Cloudinary have a great solution
Cloudinary recently released their free WordPress plugin that allows you to take advantage of their image optimisation, manipulation and content delivery network. The plugin and basic service is free to use with a premium upgrade.
What does Cloudinary do?
The Cloudinary plugin gives you the ability to upload your images to their worldwide CDN (content delivery network). A CDN is a network of servers that stores your content and delivers it to viewers based on location.
Simply put, if you host your website in the US and users access it from the UK, it will take longer for the information to appear on the screen in the UK than it does in the US. A CDN detects where the user is based and delivers the same content from a server nearest to them, speeding up delivery.
A CDN is a very useful way of speeding up your site, especially if you have lots of visitors. It evens out the load on your host.
Unlike many CDN’s, Cloudinary only stores your images in the cloud, not all your website content.
In addition to potentially speeding up the delivery using the CDN, Cloudinary optimises your images by stripping out all the unneccesary data. So super -fast loading images are now within reach.
Image manipulation
Just to get even more amazing, the Cloudinary plugin allows you to edit images and add effects straight from your blog.
The WordPress plugin does require an Cloudinary account. The free account is more than adequate for most standard WordPress blogs and websites with 500MB storage, 50,000 images and 1GB monthly bandwidth. Premium upgrades are available as needed, starting from $39 per month.
Is there a downside to all this awesomeness?
Of course there is.
WordPress featured image isn’t supported, which is disappointing. You can still use the standard WordPress upload for your featured image. The “upload to Cloudinary” link for older images in the media files section so far isn’t working for me – I’ve not looked closely at this yet, it could just be my blog.
Overall, Cloudinary has made it into my nifty online toolbox.
Get started with Cloudinary
- Sign up for a Cloudinary free account
- Install the Cloudinary plugin
- Copy the Cloudinary URL from your Cloudinary dashboard
- Paste the URL in the Cloudinary settings
- Start hosting your images in the Cloudinary cloud
Over to you…
Do you use a CDN on your blog? Will you try the Cloudinary plugin?
Cloudinary Plugin - Free CDN and Image Manipulation by Jan Kearney
I wonder how much this speeds up the load time for your blog? Have anything to measure against that would give us this information?
Sounds like a wonderful plan, but did you say $39 a month? FREE would be much better on the budget. 🙂
Hi Bonnie, you can start free. The free account is more than enough for most people, and if you’re getting the traffic so free isn’t enough then a paid version shouldn’t be out of the budget 🙂
It will speed up pages with images (assuming you have uploaded the images to the cloudinary space). It does this in 2 ways.
1. The CDN function – delivering the images from a server geographically closer to your visitor, which also balances the load on your server.
2. Image optimisation – it strips out all the unneccessary stuff and compresses the file.
I’m a bit gutted that the WordPress featured image is missing on cloud uploads – but that can be worked around.
A quick and totally unscientific check on load speed of this post was 1.22 seconds. The Google Plus post was 1.77 seconds (no cloudinary) and the QR post 2.14 seconds (no cloudinary). I will be keeping an eye on it.
Sounds like a great plugin. I re-size my images prior to putting them on my site.
I resize mine too, Toni – give the plugin a go, I was quite surprised at the load difference just for a couple of images 🙂
Hi Jan,
I’m quite new to CDN and don’t fully understand, I’ll admit that much.
I do use AS3 for my membership site videos and files that I’m currently constructing, and I see the need for that.
But is it really necessary to store individual images on a distribution network for faster delivery? It seems to me to be saying that the internet is getting all clogged up if we have to resort to this practice?
Just my thoughts and I may be totally wrong 🙂
Paul
Hi Paul – is it necessary? Well that’s down to personal preference. Most CDN’s cover all your static content, and you pay for that. I know I had this baby blog running through a CDN for a while because it’s hosted in the US and my market is UK. The traffic here isn’t worth the investment for shaving of half a second loading. Cloudinary have the option to just upload your images – and they’re a big slow down on many sites. As traffic increases, I would recommend a CDN to even out the load. Horses for courses 🙂
Hi Jan,
Itai from Cloudinary here. We really appreciate this awesome post 🙂
A quick update about the WordPress featured image issue – I’m happy to report that we’ve got a solution for this in the works. We should have an upgrade released next week that would support this.
Cheers,
– Itai
That’s great news Itai! Thanks for popping in too 🙂
Hi Jan
Well I certainly need to speed up my blog so this has to be worth a try. Looking at the documentation, it looks a bit complicated! Not sure if it’s above my pay-grade…. 🙂
Perhaps it’ll all come clear when I install the plugin – I just created the account so far. Tomorrow is another day and it may look simpler then!
Joy
Hi Joy, you can start with a free account. Sign up for an account, install the plugin and paste your Cloudinary URL in the plugin settings and you’re good to go. Next time you upload an image to your blog, use the Cloudinary button rather than the WordPress upload media button.
Hi Jan
Well, in this case the “thinking about it” (yesterday) turned out to be worse than the “doing it” (today) and I put my first image on my blog using Cloudinary, on my most recent post (see CL).
The poor quality of the image in the post is the fault of the original, NOT something Cloudinary has done.
Tagging seems a little clunky (or perhaps I’ve not got the hang of that), but getting the image into the post was very easy. Hard to tell about the speed on one image / post. Perhaps when I get round it it (hahaha) I can go back and move some of my key images to Cloudinary.
Thanks for finding this, I’ll use it on my two main blogs and hope it will speed things up.
Joy
Great stuff, Joy! Heading over to have a look.
As for the tagging – I think it’s what you get used to. Like when WP updated to 3.5 and shifted everything around with the images. It would make life easier if the tags were immediately visible without that bit of scrolling on Cloudinary.
Good idea for speeding things up – slow loading is a killer. I think my blog speed is ok (tell me if you think not) but this looks interesting thanks.
Try running it through Google’s pagespeed analyser – you’ll get a score. Mine bounces between 82-84 depending on what day it is I think, which is ok but not fabulous. Hopefully running future images through cloudinary will help that too 🙂 https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
Hi Jan
This looks good
Paul Henderson – you can upload your images to as3 too but I never thought of doing that
Will give this a try especially since they are going to get the featured image working too
Thanks Jan if it made it to your nifty online toolbox it’s good enough for me!
Sue
Featured image is now on, Sue – not tried it out yet!
Hi all,
I wanted to update that the Cloudinary plugin was upgraded with support for featured images.
WordPress media items are now created also for attachments of images generated by Cloudinary. The media items link to the remote cloud-based images and can be used for featured images and galleries. Note that you will need to save a draft of your post in order to see newly attached images available in the featured image selection dialog.
Great stuff! Thanks for popping back in Itai 🙂