Optimising Images on Podia with Cloudflare: A Guide for Better Performance
Originally published: 18 August 2024
Are there any good, free options?
Optimizing Images on Podia with Cloudflare: A Guide for Better Performance
As some of you may know, I recently made the switch to Podia for my main business website, The Meat Medic. Podia has been a good platform so far—it offers an all-in-one solution for hosting courses, creating membership sites, and selling digital products. It’s also very affordable, making it a great choice for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
However, one area where Podia’s built-in website builder falls short is optimisation, particularly image optimisation. Unlike some other website builders, Podia doesn’t include any native image optimization tools, nor does it easily allow for the use of external CDN services to optimize images via URLs. This can be a challenge because unoptimized images can significantly slow down your website, leading to a poor user experience.
To compound this, by default the headers are set to zero caching! So not only is there no optimisation, there’s also no caching, or lazy loading! Kind of insane right? I’ve fed this all back to Podia…
To try to address this, I turned to Cloudflare, a popular service known for its CDN and security features. Although the advanced image optimization features like Polish are only available on paid plans, there are still several strategies you can use on Cloudflare’s free plan to improve your site’s performance.
1. Use Basic Caching and CDN
Even on the free plan, Cloudflare’s CDN caches your website’s static assets, including images. This means that your images are served from the closest data center to the visitor, reducing load times.
2. Optimize Images Before Uploading
Since Podia doesn’t optimize images for you, it’s crucial to optimize them before uploading. Here’s how you can do it:
- Manual Compression: Use tools like TinyPNG, JPEG-Optimizer, or ImageOptim to compress images without losing quality.
- Convert to WebP: Convert images to WebP format, which offers better compression than JPEG or PNG. You can do this using online tools or image editing software. Unfortunately, Podia only allows JPG and PNG!
- Resize Images: Ensure that your images are no larger than necessary. Serving oversized images can unnecessarily slow down your site.
3. Leverage Cloudflare’s Browser Cache Expiration
By adjusting the browser cache expiration time in Cloudflare’s dashboard, you can allow visitors’ browsers to store images locally for longer periods. This reduces the need to download the same image multiple times, speeding up subsequent visits.
4. Enable Auto Minify
In the Cloudflare dashboard, you can enable Auto Minify for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While this doesn’t directly affect images, it reduces the overall page size, improving load times and indirectly benefiting image performance.
5. Use External Image Optimization Services
If you need more advanced image optimization, consider integrating an external service like ImageKit, Cloudinary, or Imgix. These services can dynamically optimize and deliver images, but they might require some custom setup.
6. Implement a Responsive Design
Ensure that your Podia site uses responsive images that adjust to different screen sizes and resolutions. This way, mobile users are served smaller, optimized images, saving bandwidth and improving load times.
7. Monitor and Analyze Performance
Lastly, use Cloudflare’s Analytics section to monitor your site’s performance. While on the free plan, you still have access to basic metrics that can help you understand how well your images and other assets are performing. Google lighthouse is a good alternative.
Conclusion
While Podia offers many benefits as a website builder and all-in-one platform, it does have some significant limitations when it comes to image optimizstion. By using Cloudflare, even on the free plan, and following the strategies outlined above, you can significantly improve your website’s performance. If you’re looking for a robust platform to host your digital products, courses, or membership site, I highly recommend checking out Podia. With a bit of extra effort, you can ensure that your site is both fast and functional.
If you found this guide helpful, be sure to check out more content on sureshkhirwadkar.dev where I share tips and tricks on website optimisation, digital marketing, and more!
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