Images are one of the most crucial elements of e-commerce websites. This is because e-commerce sites sell goods and tangible products online, and images help them to convince people to buy their products. In fact, product images are the first thing that most people notice when they buy something online. In other words, images improve conversion rate, and they can make or break your e-commerce website. For this reason, almost all e-commerce stores and websites upload a wide range of photos. However, to display images on your website, you need to store and host them somewhere. Hosting images on your server can slow down your website, driving the customers away. For this reason, it’s best to use an image hosting API and host your images on a third-party platform.
Using a free image hosting API for image upload and image storage offers several benefits. Read on to learn more about image hosting APIs for e-commerce websites.
What are Image Hosting Services and APIs?
An image hosting service enables users to upload pictures to a remote server, and you can then access the images online from anywhere and display them on your website. This way, you don’t have to save images on your server and worry about server bandwidth and storage space issues, website performance, and loading time. In other words, an image hosting service makes sharing or displaying photos on your website easy. Many image hosting services also have an API (Application Programming Interface) allowing you to programmatically upload, manage, and retrieve images. This means you can programmatically use these image hosting APIs to integrate images on your website.
Some image hosting services also offer a file uploader that you can integrate into your website to enable end-users to upload their own images.
How Does an Image Hosting API Work?
An image hosting service has a user interface that users can use to upload images from their local devices. Most services also enable users to upload pictures from integrated cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox. Once the images are uploaded, they are stored on the server. The hosting service provides a URL (publicly accessible) that you can use to display images on your website.
If you’re using an image hosting API, you can upload and retrieve images using HTTP methods (GET and POST.) You first need to get your API key to use an image hosting API. You can then use your API key and API endpoints to upload, host, and retrieve images. For example, an image hosting API can have two endpoints, one for uploading and hosting images and one for retrieving or serving the image.
What Is the Importance of Images for E-commerce Websites?
Images, especially product photos, are a key element of e-commerce websites. They enhance your product description and convince users to buy their desired products. Since buyers can’t physically see the products they purchase online, product photos provide a way to see what they are buying. All in all, product images provide quick information on the product and enhance user experience. For this reason, almost all e-commerce websites upload multiple images of a product, displaying different product features.
What are the Benefits of Using Image Hosting APIs for E-commerce Websites?
Using an image hosting service or image hosting API for your e-commerce site has many benefits:
Improved Website Performance and Loading Speed
E-commerce websites consist of a number of product photos. Uploading and hosting all these photos, especially large images, on your web server can slow down the loading time of your website. This directly affects website performance and drives customers away from your website. However, an image hosting API offers a quick and efficient way to host your images on a remote server, improving the overall performance of your website.
Reduced Server Load and Bandwidth Usage
Using a third-party image hosting API means uploading and storing images on a remote server. This reduces the load on your web server, and you don’t have to worry about allocating storage space for photos on your web server.
Enhanced User Experience
A reliable image hosting API lets you quickly and seamlessly deliver product images to users across multiple platforms and devices. This enhances user experience and can increase conversions.
Better Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Many image hosting services also offer image optimization tools that you can use to optimize images for the web before uploading them. For example, you can reduce your pictures’ size, image pixel dimensions, etc. Image optimization helps improve website ranking on Google.
What are the Ideal Features of Image Hosting APIs for E-commerce Websites?
When choosing an image hosting service or image hosting API, you should look for the following features:
Scalability and Flexibility
A good image hosting service or API should allow you to scale up your storage space as your requirement to host more images increases. Choosing such an API ensures you will always have enough storage.
Supported Formats
An ideal image hosting API should support all major image file types for the web, such as PNG, JPG, and GIF. Check if the hosting service supports different video formats if you also want to host videos.
Security Features
When images are stored and hosted online, protecting them from theft or misuse is essential. Hence, security is a crucial feature of a hosting API, and it should offer features like encryption and password-protected storage for security reasons.
Automated Image Processing Capabilities
Top image hosting APIs also offers automated image processing features. This means once you upload the images, the API performs various manipulations to enhance and optimize the image before you display them on your website.
How Can Filestack Help You with Uploading and Delivering Images on the Web?
Filestack offers a comprehensive set of tools and APIs for managing files in your web apps. It operates in three key areas of modern software file management systems. These include Uploads, Transformations, and Delivery.
Upload
With Filestack file uploader, called File Picker, you can quickly add a fast and secure file uploader to your web app. The uploader is highly configurable and customizable. Moreover, it enables developers to connect their apps directly to 20+ sources, such as Facebook, AWS, Instagram, Google Drive, Dropbox, and more. Developers can also access the underlying API through various SDKs. With Filestack File API, you can also upload images and files through HTTP.
Storage and Hosting
Filestack uploads all the uploaded files to its own internally managed S3 bucket in N.Virginia. However, you can also use your own S3 bucket in any region. Moreover, you can integrate your existing cloud storage solution with Filestack. Filestack supports all the major cloud storage providers, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, and Dropbox.
Delivery and Transformation
You will get a unique image URL for every image file uploaded with Filestack. You can use this URL to display the images in your app or download them. Filestack uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to enable fast and reliable access to your assets from anywhere. You can use the CDN to access all files managed by your Filestack app. This is a helpful feature for e-commerce sites. With the right CDN, you can ensure a pleasant customer experience. This is because images are much easier and quicker to deliver when the server bringing the content to the users is within their certain physical proximity.
You can also transform the images using the Filestack processing API before displaying them on your app. Filestack also allows you to automate your workflows.
You can learn more using our comprehensive documentation.
Conclusion
Image hosting APIs and services are essential tools for e-commerce websites. They reduce the load from your web server by allowing you to host images on a remote server. Moreover, these hosting APIs improve website performance by improving page loading time. With Filestack, you can provide amazing experiences to your website users.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Where Should You Host Images for Your Website?
Hosting your website images on a remote server using an image hosting service is best. Doing this reduces the load on the website server and improves website performance.
Can You Host Your Website Images for Free?
Many image hosting services offer free plans. However, the storage is limited with the free plan. If you want more storage, you can subscribe to a paid plan.
How Can You Host Your Website Images Easily?
You can use an image hosting API to host your website images in a third-party remote server. These hosting services provide an easy-to-use upload interface to upload and host your web images.
Sign up for free and try the Filestack today!
Sidra is an experienced technical writer with a solid understanding of web development, APIs, AI, IoT, and related technologies. She is always eager to learn new skills and technologies.