Four reasons you should try Fastly’s Image Optimizer

Is your team managing an increasingly growing image library for your web properties? There’s a path forward that doesn’t require more manual work for your team or investing in a costly dedicated image optimization solution. That’s Fastly’s Image Optimizer.

Major brands with strong web presences like The Guardian rely on Image Optimizer to serve pixel-perfect images on the fly. Here are four reasons why you should try it out too.

Reason 1: Save time for other valuable work

While images can be the backbone of your websites, engineering teams often rank resizing images near the bottom of their to-do list. 

Image Optimizer can cover the basics for your team — and more. Get the key features you need to serve your images, including dynamic resizing and max file size support of up to 50 MB, so you can focus on other, more important projects.

Thanks to Image Optimizer, one customer optimized their entire image library for mobile in about a week, which would have otherwise taken them six months to finish. 

Reason 2: Cut page load times 

Image optimization should play a critical role in any strategy to improve your Core Web Vitals. Optimizing your images can cut page load times, which in turn can help you achieve your key business objectives — whether that’s growing readership, increasing conversions, or improving SEO rankings. 

A real-life example of improved performance at work: Buzzfeed leveraged Image Optimizer to condense their 250 MB, browser-freezing “100 Greatest Gifs of all Time” article to a much more manageable 6 MB. Instead of waiting for their content to load, readers were delighted — not frustrated — when trying to access Buzzfeed’s viral story.

Reason 3: Lower infrastructure costs 

Image Optimizer can help eliminate expensive image transformation applications and servers at your origin. By storing one source file and generating the optimal image for each profile on demand, at the edge, you can save on storage costs.

And an added bonus: you can gain visibility into your total number of image requests with Fastly’s dashboard.

Reason 4: Stay on the cutting edge

Our dedicated product team is committed to growing and supporting our Image Optimizer offering, so you can stay on the cutting edge by investing in Fastly.

In fact, we’ve begun rolling out several top feature requests from customers, including:

• AVIF output format: Support for AVIF, or AV1 image format, an open-source and royalty-free image format that has seen increased adoption, as it features significantly reduced file sizes versus other formats.

• Auto-trim by color: Lets you trim an image border based on color or automatically detected border. As the team from Napster told us, “Please don't take this away from us. We'd have to build it ourselves.”

• Metadata pass through: Retain some metadata instead of deleting all. For example, a news site may need to retain business-specific metadata (for example copyright) for legal reasons, but have other metadata removed top optimize performance.

Curious to try Image Optimizer for yourself? Check out our online Image Optimizer experience, or request a trial today.