Image optimisation, SEO and using a CDN

Hi guys,

Running a site performance test using http://www.webpagetest.org/ flags a number of issues regarding the delivery of images.  This raises the following questions:

• Does SmartStore attempt to compress images before serving them (and if not, are there any plans to do this)?

• Even though the original file name of each uploaded product image was SEO friendly, this is changed when it is served from the site (e.g. car-engine.jpg becomes 032174-car-engine-180.jpg).  This obviously creates a problem when trying to rank well in Google image search.  What is causing this, and can anything be done to fix it?

• Is it possible to use a CDN to serve all category and product images (and therefore hopefully fix the compression issue listed above)? I only want to serve static content (e.g images and bundled CSS/JS) from the CDN.  Is this supported out of the box?  And if so, how?

Many thanks.

Nick

Does SmartStore attempt to compress images before serving them (and if not, are there any plans to do this)?

No, but static file compression is something that can be configured in IIS.

Even though the original file name of each uploaded product image was SEO friendly, this is changed when it is served from the site (e.g. car-engine.jpg becomes 032174-car-engine-180.jpg).  This obviously creates a problem when trying to rank well in Google image search.  What is causing this, and can anything be done to fix it?

The physical name of your media file has no effect on the actual resulting file name. It's a composition of entity id, SEO friendly entity name and image size. And no, you can't fix it.

Is it possible to use a CDN to serve all category and product images (and therefore hopefully fix the compression issue listed above)? I only want to serve static content (e.g images and bundled CSS/JS) from the CDN.  Is this supported out of the box?  And if so, how?

Yes, it is possible: Configuration > Stores > [Store] > Content Delivery Network URL.

Hi Murat,

Thanks for the answers.

Do you have any documentation about how to configure the CDN settings?  Can it be configured to only use the CDN for images?

Just enter your CDN's URL, e.g. https://something.cloudfront.net. It only affects images, nothing else.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, as Cloudflare (my desired CDN) doesn't appear to provide a specific CDN URL - it just requires a change to my name server settings and then I think it attempts to manage ALL content (which is configured in Cloudflare control panel).  I don't understand what the URL in store settings actually does...

Please could you shed some light on this?  If CloudFlare (or any CDN provider) automatically handles all images for your domain, why do we need to specify a CDN url in store settings?

Because of the generated URLs for media files. Without this setting, the files would be served with your domain's name.