According to Adam Newman, Senior Product Manager, Akamai Technologies, one of the most important steps is to optimize and automate image and video content, to balance the visual elements visitors crave and reduce the weight of these assets to maintain performance.
The world has gone from “normal†to shelter-in-place in a matter of months. And with that, everyone (and I mean everyone) went online. Global internet traffic has increased by 30% in the past month aloneOpens a new window – that’s an entire year’s worth of growth in a matter of weeks. With everyone forced online we are starting to settle into a new reality. Some foresee a whole new relationship with work—25-30%Opens a new window of the workforce could be working remotely at least part of the time. This new normal poses challenges, but also major opportunities.
According to economic research by the US Census Bureau, in Q4 of 2019 only 11.4%Opens a new window of US retail sales were online, while brick-and-mortar accounted for the rest (88.6%). With limited brick-and-mortar stores starting to reopen and major bankruptcies recently announced, digital strategies have never been more critical. It’s now the time to make digital stronger.
Learn More: Digital Experience Analytics: The DNA of Online Enterprises
For the foreseeable future, most business will be conducted virtually. The mobile site that has been supporting physical stores is now the only connection to customers, looking to fill that 88.6% gap. According to a 2019 reportOpens a new window by The Drum, 63% of retail traffic and 53% of sales happen via mobile. Basically, people use the mobile app to check prices, styles, availability, but many still ultimately purchase items in a physical store. But now there are many fewer physical stores and, even as countries reopen, we can expect severe limitations. So how do we fill the gap and keep costs low?
The answer is: building value-driven engaging digital experiences by embracing the creative and reimagining the entire digital experience. For example, some retailers have recently opened up their premium paid subscription apps, offering them for free, and are now engaging with more users in an increasingly authentic way. These apps are providing a service and engagement through education that is heavily based on the performance of images and videos. This isn’t new technology but by removing the pay wall to engaging content, everyone wins—consumers and businesses included. It works because images, and especially videos, are engaging. When websites are loaded with useful content, people engage more—88% more on pages with videosOpens a new window , for example.
But what about all that page weight? On average, images and videos represent a significant 67%Opens a new window of total bytes on a webpage. In order to provide engaging experiences, optimizing visual content is mission critical.
What else should you consider as you rethink and re-imagine how you engage with your users while keeping page weight down? Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Keep ‘above-the-fold’ light and visually engaging. Hero videos and images can make it or break it. Make sure the quality is high and the bytes are low. It’s especially important not to add any extra weight with video players if you can avoid it—try sticking with an HTML5 player.
- Stop treating all your images the same. If you are using the same static image quality for all of your images, you’ve made yourself a flying car—neither a good car nor a good airplane. The structural similarity (SSIM) index is a method for quantifying the similarities between two images and can be leveraged to identify what a human eye can perceive as visual differences. By leveraging this approach with your images you can attain improved byte savings with little to no impact on what a human would perceive as quality loss.
- Use next-gen formats, but make sure the visual quality is the same across all touchpoints. Next-gen formats like WebP, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, H.265 and WebM, are great. WebP, for example, can save roughly 30% of bytes compared to JPEG. However, don’t overlook the fact that WebP might not have the same visual fidelity of the same image in a JPEG 2000 format. So take the time and align those qualities so each user gets the same experience you’ve intended no matter which device and browser they use to access your content.
- Be aware of your users’ network quality and adjust to it. An experience is better than no experience. By understanding the connection quality between your end users and your site/app, it allows you to deliver an image or video at an appropriate quality level—ensuring users get to interact with the experience you’ve created. This type of functionality is not just for big streaming platforms. Your users will notice, and thank you, for saving them from downloading all that extra data they couldn’t appreciate.
Learn More: 4 Tips for Effective Marketing in the Next Normal
With everything from healthcare to education, work to entertainment, primarily online, there is an opportunity to make huge advancements in changing how users interact with our digital experiences. Take advantage of this time to make your digital experiences more engaging. You have a captive audience, and this is your opportunity to make large leaps forward in innovation that can positively change how everyone does business online.