Ecommerce question - Should I use a CDN for my images. ?

[SarahCollins]

Hi ,

We are currently in the process of re-developing out commerce website and I wondering should we use a CDN (content delivery nertwork) for our product images.

My category pages are currently showing approx 21 product images per page and the page speed is okay but can be better but the page size is rather large ... anything between 600kb - 1 Meg. We do optimise the images already in photoshop. We also do things like minify etc to get the pages to load as fast as possible but I think the only thing left is using a CDN but I have heard mixed reports about using this.?

We are also doing a mobile responsive version of the site to but I know that speed will be king with google and how it reflects on rankings.

Whilst I can see a CDN will improve image page load speed etc, I guess there a negative SEO impact as well as images will be stored in the cloud ?.. as opposed on to on my site/database.

Does anyone know how best to implement a CDN without impacting on SEO or know of any good SEO /implementation articles on this ?... Maybe do Ieave some images on my category pages so I can still do the alt image tags etc/ and have the remaining images on the CDN.?

Many Thanks

Sarah

[Bio-RadAbs]

For a personal project, I implemented a CDN to my site (MaxCDN). The CDN now delivers every image via a subdomain and the CDN has sped my site's load speed.

My goal from the start was speed, and in fact I got obsessed with load speed as I wanted to score over 90 in Google's PageSpeed and GTMetrix. There was another element at play and it was the most crucial one - the customer. I'm impatient when it comes to web browsing and I know I'm not alone. We know what we want when we click links, and we expect it to load fast. I am my own customer so speed was important.

I name my image files with SEO in mind, using dashes, key phrases relavant to the image and alt tags, but I also know images aren't the sole driver for link backs and leads. Your site is an ecommerce site, if you have up to 21 images per page, speed is the importance here.

• Your customers are more likely to link/share to your product page not images
• The goal for you is an ecommerce conversion. Users who share your images might fall into 2 groups, users who share images for the aesthetic value and users who share the image for a purchase. Those sharing for purchase will more likely share the page URL and that's the audience you want.
• This ties into how users will find your images, search engines will offer the ability to see the image (aesthetic audience) and visit the page (potential purchaser). Getting the right alt tag, image file name will help rank your image higher in the search result for images
• Hosting your images in a subdomain should be fine as your site is an ecommerce one, it isn't deviantArt where they want every link to the core domain
• You already are using the correct file names and alt tags. Images are just one element of an optimisation strategy.

To conclude, I would put yourself in your customer's shoes and ask, what do I want when I visit your ecommerce site. Will a slow site frustrate/make you leave? Will speed change your experience with the site and thus make you browse more? How are you showing such large images? Is the user experience fluid?

[customerparadigm.com]

Sarah -

I think it's a balancing act. I agree that having images in proper directories with good image names will help with SEO for a site. It's something that most web developers overlook, because it's easy to name an image 'logo.jpg' instead of 'company-name-city-state.jpg' and put the image in a /category/ directory that matches a description of what the company does.

A CDN will often use a subdomain (i.e. cdn.domain.com) for hosting your images; this maps directly to a CDN directory.

The advantage of using a CDN on a subdomain is that you'll get the SEO value of having the images on the same domain, but it's not the best practice (search on why to use blog.domain.com vs. domain.com/blog).

That said, it's a big balancing act. And my guess is that page load time and increasing that dramatically (especially for mobile users on a slower mobile network) may do a lot more to increase your relevance and customer engagement than what you would lose from the overall SEO for the site.

So, I think your idea to leave some images (i.e. a product image or two) on the main site is fine to test. Use the CDN for your logo, images associated with the overall template / layout of the site, and perhaps even your CSS, too.

I'd measure the site load speed increase before and after, and then see if your conversion rate increases during the same time and/or your bounce rate decreases.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[Highland]

I've used Amazon CloudFront for years and never had any SEO issues. Google indexes our images just fine.Consider that most of Google's most popular sites (i.e. news sites) all use a CDN to serve images.

Google associates images based on the content you write, not on where the image is hosted.