Every retail website has hundreds of visual assets. Online shoppers don’t care how image-heavy a page is — the content should be served faster than light. To host and deliver huge amounts of data, e-commerce retailers rely on content delivery networks.

However, while traditional CDNs solve the problem of serving content regardless of visitors’ location, they do not provide the best performance in terms of image delivery. Next-generation cloud platforms empower retailers to adapt their content delivery to users’ context: their devices, connection speed, and location.

There are three key aspects that demonstrate the difference between traditional and next-gen CDNs: page loading time, infrastructure cost, and the ability to provide adaptive delivery. Let’s elaborate on this a bit more.

Page loading time

A traditional CDN delivers the exact same images that were uploaded to it. That means most of them are neither properly optimized nor encoded using the most efficient formats, which takes a toll on the user experience. According to a recent study, unoptimized images can take up 2.6 times the space of their optimized counterparts. As a result, page loading speed drops by 8.6% and 25% for desktop and mobile users, respectively.

Other research suggests there’s a direct correlation between page loading time and bounce rate as well as number of page views. Simply put, boosting content delivery speed helps streamline the user experience, which in return brings in more page views and more revenue.

Infrastructure costs

The bigger a retail business is, the more traffic it generates. With more traffic comes heftier infrastructure costs. This figure comprises the monthly bandwidth cost and the salary of the team responsible for maintaining the content delivery process. Due to the ubiquity of graphics in the modern-day Web, image delivery accounts for a significant part of monthly traffic and infrastructure spendings.

“The CDN image transformations are very helpful. People upload all kinds of images, and then we just hand them to the next-generation cloud platform, add the appropriate flags, and it automatically optimizes the images’ format, size and quality so we’re not serving up massive files,” says Finbarr Taylor, CTO at Shogun.

Since e-commerce delegates content processing to a smart CDN, it provides faster image delivery at a lower price. Shogun reduces their image bandwidth costs by 86% and enjoys an infrastructure cost savings of just over $200,000.

Adaptive delivery

More and more, people have been making purchases through multiple channels. The continuously growing diversity of devices dictates a change in the traditional approach to image delivery. The same file when it’s served to multiple devices unchanged negatively affects the impression customers get from a retail website.

A smart image-oriented CDN must be able to resize images on the fly, depending on the type of device they are being served to. This means that whether a shopper is using a 5-inch-screen smartphone or an iMac with a 5K Retina display, they should receive the content with the best visual quality, in the shortest time possible.

Such a CDN can also provide you with what’s called “lazy loading.” It’s a web-design technique that makes web pages only render images that the user has scrolled to. This boosts the speed of the e-commerce website, and thus helps increase average page views per visit and lowers the bounce rate even more.

Bottom Line

Low-speed pages on retail websites are one of the main reasons for poor shopper experience and revenue loss. Since online images generate 34% of retail traffic, using an image-oriented CDN is crucial. It’s the next generation of cloud platforms that helps you save your budget on processing traffic and infrastructure maintenance while improving customer experience.

Igor Debatur is CEO and co-founder at Uploadcare.