Confused About Compression!

  • Jimmy

    (@malayalidotca)


    1 year ago

    Hi,

    Thank you first of all, for such a great plugin!

    I just configured the plugin and I am in the process of bulk offloading the images. I understand that these images will be uploaded to cloudflare and will be served from there. But what about compression ?

    • Are the automatically compressed at cloudflare ? and if yes, what do I need to do to enable it. I mean like what type of compression and quality and things like that.
    • Or do I need to add a compression plugin like shortpixel for the compression part ?
    • I also see “AI & Compression” mentioned under image tools section and what do they offer ?
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Anton Vanyukov

    (@vanyukov)

    1 year ago

    Hi @malayalidotca,

    Cloudflare will serve in the best possible format that the users browser supports. Could be JPEG, if they are on a very old browser, or WebP/AVIF if on newer. You don’t need to compress the originals, because WebP and AVIF outperform any JPEG/PNG compression that you can have. All this is automatic, no need to enable anything.

    However, if you want to just save some space on your server, as you’ve noticed there’s an AI & Compression option. Compression is absolutely free. It works the same way as other plugins do it – compresses your images. AI offers some AI-based tools – image generation, auto caption/alt text generation.

    Best regards,
    Anton

    Thread Starter Jimmy

    (@malayalidotca)

    1 year ago

    Hi Anton,

    Thank you so much for the clarification and just to make sure that we are on the same page, when an image is offloaded to cloudflare, it is compressed by cloudflare and is served the next time. However, an image is not compressed on the sever.

    Also, what happens with the current shortpixel image compression plugin I have installed ? Do I keep it or can I disable it. I was wondering if I get more performance in the sense that the shortpixel plugin compresses an image first which then again get compressed by cloudflare when offloaded . Does that even work ?

    Also, I do not need image “tranformations” required for my use case right. Just having images compressed and served from cloudflare in wordpress pages in ehatever size they are embedded in pages.

    Can you also shed any info about how cloudflare images are billed ? I am on the pro plan and I have also opted for cloudflare images if I understand correctly. I will be charged $5 for 100,000 images and what is this 100.000 images.

    • are they 100,000 offloaded images ?
    • are they 100,000 image served as page impressions. I mean all images combined is displayed 100,000 on a browser

    I just wanted to make sure I am not getting a huge bill. Reddit has some horror stories about cloudflare images. These are old and I guess involves transformations but can you please take a look and offer any guidance ?

    New cloudflare images pricing still seems expensive for obvious use cases.
    byu/astar0n inCloudFlare

    Cloudflare Images – Most expensive product?
    byu/1nssein inCloudFlare

    Any clarification would be appreciated and sorry for the long post

    • This reply was modified 1 year ago by Jimmy.
    Plugin Author Anton Vanyukov

    (@vanyukov)

    1 year ago

    Hi @malayalidotca ,

    Yes, whenever you offload to Cloudflare, Cloudflare does all the optimization. Nothing happens on your server, the originals are still there, in case you want to revert back at some point.

    You won’t get more performance with Shortpixel. It will, however, save some space on your server, if that’s what you are after.

    You don’t need transformations (but, I think they are included with the Cloudflare Images subscription). The Cloudflare Images uses flexible variants and is able to serve exactly the size that is required. The plugin handles of detecting the correct size and adding those attributes to the Cloudflare Image URLs.

    Yeah, Cloudflare pricing is a bit weird. You’ll pay $5 for 100k images stored and $1 per 100k images delivered. However, the problem is that Cloudflare does not cache images. I think there’s a very short cache window by default. And the plugin has an option to adjust that, but on my personal tests – that doesn’t seem to help much. TLDR; if you have an average site, you’ll probably never hit over $5-6/month (I never hit this limit on 4 sites combined). But I’ve seen and heard others paying well over $50. My recommendation – test and see. If price becomes an issue – consider using a CDN with image optimization. I can help with that as well, by the way 🙂

    Best regards,
    Anton

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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