Hi there,

  Been hearing a bit about using 3rd party image hosting websites and the benefits. I am interested in trialling it on a website, because of its apparent speed efficiency being able to supply viewer with webp images if they can support it, and at the correct size. But have a couple of questions:

- Is it benificial on small websites or just larger ones? (was going to try it on a small static site built with Vue)

- Is it a lot of work to configure? I was thinking of going with https://imagekit.io/, but if the benefits are only slight for the work involved, will leave this for a larger project.

Thanks

Every server call reduces performance. A slow third party provider can slow things down. And google is all about speed. 

The speed comes from 2 places. First is file size and compression, second is where the images come from.

For the initial save then something like Tiny PNG API would work, see https://tinypng.com/developers. This will make the initial files smaller, the benefit you're storing them in that format and not relying with on the fly compression which takes valuable time. Alternatively some hosts provide compression, I know 20i does but I've not had time to play with it.

As for the second, where it comes from, there's some benefit in 3rd party image hosting for large multi-national sites, however if UK hosted with 98% UK traffic then the CDN can actually cause a slowdown as it's another step in the serving process.

I've never found a CDN that substantially improves performance. On one quite busy, image intensive, ecommerce  site the best we could get was by serving assets from a subdomain with files stored on the same server. That was a site with a primarily UK/EU audience, certainly if you have an international audience a CDN might be worthwhile - testing is key here so you can evaluate cost/performance.

Thanks for the helpful advice. As the site in question is fairly small with a UK-only audience I will definitely be keeping them on the site...

Hi Red11,

as mentioned above it could be a hard task to do, specially if you are not doing it properly.
Using CDN depends on a few things which you should keep in mind:

- How often the content is changed?
- Does the resource (file) names are being reused, e.g. do you use same file name when content is changed?
- What type of CDN you want to use - push or pull?
- Do you have any Cache policies set?

A proper CDN implementation could help you with reducing the bandwidth footprint and to protect you from traffic flood if you are hosting large files.
A rule of thumb: Less the number of requests server processes - more performance gain you will have.

To be fair, without knowing how Web Caches (not just the browser) works and some internals of HTTP protocols (versions 1.1 and 2.0) related to Cache controlling headers - any attempt to implement CDN / Cache policies could have negative impact on your web application / server.

wwell,
Ursel