Have you ever thought of improving the user experience of your website through CDNs? Do you know the importance of free image CDN? As a matter of fact, it is important to use high-quality images to engage your audience. It can help us improve the user experience as well as SEO on our websites. Moreover, using image CDN free service can help us get better images.
The size of images also plays a huge role in a website’s performance. For example, using large-sized images can reduce the website speed. As a result, it also has a negative impact on user experience. This is where image CDN free services come. In this article, we will learn about free image CDNs and how they impact user experience.
If you are a developer, you must read this article till the end. It can help you improve the user experience of your client’s websites. So what are you waiting for? Let’s dig into this article.
What Is CDN?
CDN stands for “Content Delivery Network”. It is a distributed network of servers that can help us deliver our images faster. In other words, it can speed up the delivery of internet content. It stores the catcher copies and reduces the latency to increase website content delivery performance.
You must know that CDN service is helpful in the fast delivery of different content types. Some examples are images, web pages, videos, and other assets available on the internet.
Let’s check out the working of image CDNs in two simple steps:
- It stores the catcher copies of images or videos available on multiple servers in different geographical locations.
- It delivers the content from the server when a user requests a particular content. However, you must know that it uses the server nearest the user. This is how we get the output faster.
Why Use an Image CDN?
If you are a developer who loves to develop applications and websites that manage data, you must use CDN. Do you know why? Well, it ensures the faster and more reliable delivery of the content. However, there are so many other reasons to use an image CDN. Let’s learn about them.
Faster Loading
You must know that image CDNs cache your images on multiple servers across the globe. As a result, we get fast loading of images by getting the output from the nearest server.
Cost-Effective Solution
It saves our costs by preventing the need to build our own image delivery infrastructure. As a result, we can spend the saved costs on other aspects of our application.
Reduced Load on Your Server
We must know that image hosting on our server can put a higher load on it. As a result, it can slow down the website’s performance. Image CDN helps us offload our content on a third-party server. Hence, reducing the load on our server.
Better User Experience
As mentioned earlier, we get faster speed and delivery of content and a better user experience. Moreover, the better the user experience, the higher the search engine optimization score.
What Are Free Image CDNs?
Free image CDNs give us free plans to manage our content on our website. However, these CDNs offer limited bandwidth and storage to manage the website data. Therefore, these CDNs are more suitable for small or medium-sized websites.
Note that paid image CDNs can offer better performance, features, reliability, storage, and bandwidth. The paid image CDNs might be a little costly, but they can highly improve your website data management. Let’s look at some free image CDNs available in the market today.
Filestack
Filestack offers both free as well as paid plans for developers. The free plan offers bandwidth and Filestack storage of 1GB. It also includes up to 1000 image transformations and 500 uploads. Moreover, it has three more plans; Start, Grow, and Scale. You can also choose a customized plan.
Here is the base URL for all assets of Filestack CDN:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/HANDLENote that the duration of Filestack cached copy of the URL is 30 days. When a user requests it again, the URL is cached again. You can add the /cache=false/ to the above URL to bypass the cache. Here is an example:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/cache=false/HANDLEYou can also decide the duration of cached files by adding an expiry value as under:
https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/cache=expiry:value/HANDLEFor more information, you can check our comprehensive documentation. Apart from Filestack, the following are some more image CDN hosting providers available in the market today:
Cloudinary
Cloudinary is one of the most common free image CDNs. It can help you optimize and deliver the images faster.
Note that Cloudinary also offers free and paid plans for its users.
Cloudflare
It is another free image CDN that comes with enterprise-grade speed. Note that Cloudflare is one of the most affordable image CDNs available in the market. You can also choose a customized plan. It just asks you to select your goal after signing up. Then, you enter the link of your website and follow the given steps.
ImageKit
You must know the fact that ImageKit allows CDN for images and video content only. After signing up, you get an ImageKit ID which is your unique identifier.
Then, it asks you to select the region and presents you with a detailed dashboard to proceed further.
TinyIMG
TinyIMG is one of the intelligent image optimization and compression tools. However, you must know that Shopify stores mostly use this image CDN. Moreover, this tool management didn’t reveal the pricing information yet.
Each of the above CDNs offers unique features and pricing plans. You can choose the image CDN service depending on your requirements.
What Are the Benefits of Using Free Image CDN for User Experience?
There are multiple benefits to using free image CDNs. Here are some most common benefits:
- A free image CDN increases the loading speed of your website. As a result, the users become happy to get the output faster.
- The better the loading speed, the higher the user engagement. You must know that a seamless browsing experience and reduced wait times can give a better user experience and engagement. As a result, you can easily get rid of the slow-loading web page.
- Free image CDN can also be helpful for the SEO ranking of your websites. When more users are engaging with your website, it automatically increases the SEO ranking.
- It can also help our website handle sudden website spikes in traffic without the need to sacrifice performance. A free image CDN solves such kinds of issues easily.
- Also, you can build stunning websites at a lower cost with free image CDNs.
- You can ensure a reliable and secure image file delivery with free image CDNs.
How to Implement Free Image CDN on Your Website?
You must know that there are different ways to implement free image CDN on your website. Here is how you can implement Filestack CDN on your website:
First of all, you must choose a free or paid CDN plan on the Filestack website. It will bring you to the page where you have to sign up. After the sign-up process, you will have to verify your account. Then, it will bring you to the following dashboard page:
Secondly, you have to click on “Integrate Filestack File Picker in your application”.
The next step is to click on CDN in the options appearing in the left column. It will bring you to the following page. You can follow this documentation to implement the CDN service in your application.
Here is an example of implementing Filestack CDN image URL through an HTML code:
<img src="https://cdn.filestackcontent.com/api/file/{handle}" alt="My Image">You can consult the Filestack support system or refer to our documentation for more information and further help on image processing.
What Are Some Ideal Factors to Consider in Choosing a Free Image CDN?
You must have realized the importance of using a CDN in your application. However, it is also important to choose the right image CDN. Here are some factors that you can consider:
- Look for an image CDN that delivers images quickly and efficiently. This can help improve page load times and overall user experience.
- You must check for the optimization and compression features in your image CDN. It can help us reduce image size and improve image quality. You should ensure real-time image optimization through powerful image optimization algorithms.
- Ensure that the image CDN you choose is secure and can protect your images from unauthorized access, theft, or misuse. Filetack offers protection and security features for its users.
- Your image CDN must be able to scale up or down as needed to accommodate changes in traffic.
- Ensure that the image CDN you choose is reliable and has a high uptime percentage to ensure that your images are always available to your users.
- You must ensure that your chosen image CDN is easy to integrate.
- Finally, make sure that you can afford the chosen image CDN. It must fit your budget and fulfill your requirements.
Free Image CDN: Final Thoughts
Using a free image CDN can have a significant impact on user experience by improving page load times, reducing server load, and enhancing image quality.
By selecting reliable and secure best-image CDN providers that are easy to integrate, website owners can provide a seamless browsing experience for their users. Therefore, resulting in higher engagement and, ultimately, better conversion rates.
With the increasing importance of images in digital content, incorporating a free image CDN into your website or application can be a cost-effective way to boost user experience. So what are you waiting for? Implement Filestack content delivery network service in your application today!
Free Image CDN: FAQs
Which Is Free CDN for Storing Images?
Filestack can help you store the images through its free plan. You can also use Google CDN or Amazon CloudFront CDN. It is also the fastest image CDN. You can also find other best CDN providers on the internet.
Are There Free CDNs?’
Yes. You can check out the list of free image CDN services mentioned above.
Can You Use CDN for Images?
You can use CDN for any type of content. You can use it for image or video management. CDNs compress images to increase their loading speed. As a result, they can help accelerate application delivery.
Can I Use CDN Offline?
No, a CDN (Content Delivery Network) cannot be used offline.
Sign up today to use the Filestack Image CDN and improve your website performance.
Ayesha Zahra is a Geo Informatics Engineer with hands-on experience in web development (both frontend & backend). Also, she is a technical writer, a passionate programmer, and a video editor. She is always looking for opportunities to excel in her skills & build a strong career.