This year’s Black Friday brought mobile into the spotlight. Make sure your site (or app) doesn’t miss out on this growing trend of buying and browsing holiday deals from mobile devices with a little help from Filestack.
Another Black Friday has come and gone. While the early numbers were below what was predicted by industry analysts, reports hinted that mobile-friendly retailers have a clear advantage this holiday season. How? While most of the online buying still occurs on bigger screens, consumers are browsing and buying more on their smartphones and tablets. TechCrunch reported that “57% of traffic came from mobile devices on Thanksgiving,” and 37% of Black Friday sales were transacted on smartphones and tablets. These numbers indicate a growing trend towards mobile shopping.
While some web developers have already adopted a “mobile first” attitude with their site design and others are using strategies like progressive enhancement to ensure compatibility with a number of different screen sizes and browsing environments, there are still many sites that might miss out due to a lack of mobile strategy.
Not to fear, because regardless of which category you fall into here are a few ways that Filestack can help you make your site ready for the small screen.
Responsive Images
A responsive website is one that ensures an optimal user experience by intuitively adapting to the user’s screen size. In most cases this is accomplished with some JavaScript and CSS, but extending this strategy to all of your media assets can be challenging.
Filestack’s Responsive Image feature can take much of the heavy lifting off of your web developer. By including our JavaScript library and some special IMG tags, all of the images on your site will automatically scale with the changing size of the browser window. And the best part is that this works for images whether they’re being stored with Filestack, your own environment or anywhere else on the Internet.
Read more about Responsive Images
Filestack CDN
Online buyers are notoriously impatient and this consumer restlessness increases exponentially for folks buying or browsing on a mobile connection like LTE or 3G, or even worse, EDGE. Because of the unpredictable nature of mobile connectivity, these would-be buyers are more likely to give up on your site at the slightest hint of latency or long load times. Fortunately, Filestack has you covered here as well.
Filestack now delivers pictures, videos and any other files dynamically using our new content delivery network. This CDN uses a number of geographically disperse caching servers to store your content as close to your users as possible. This minimizes load time and, in best cases, reduced server load and hosting cost.
Learn more about Filestack’s CDN
Filestack Viewer
Even though we live in the Internet Age, that doesn’t mean all of your content is ready for the browser. You might have a PDF of a printed catalog, a sales presentation in a PowerPoint file or a technical white paper stored in a Word file. Sure, this can all be translated into web-friendly HTML and CSS, but that takes time and money.
The most common strategy is to ask your users to rely on a handful of plugins to handle the translation for you, but is no good for mobile browsers who lack the ability to install these translation tools. On the other hand, the Filestack Viewer is the easiest way to allow your visitors to view a variety of file types on both their desktop and mobile browsers, sans the heavy plugins.
One advantage offered by the Filestack Viewer is that it doesn’t need to be embedded on a existing page on your site. Meaning you can link directly to the preview version of the file using Filestack’s URL.
Learn more about the Filestack Viewer
Filestack Libraries for iOS and Android
Someone once said there’s nothing like the real thing. And we agree. For those of you translating your website into native iOS and Android apps you can easily extend Filestack’s features into your mobile experience using our native libraries.
Filestack is a dynamic team dedicated to revolutionizing file uploads and management for web and mobile applications. Our user-friendly API seamlessly integrates with major cloud services, offering developers a reliable and efficient file handling experience.