Should I use this plugin or cloudflare’s free cdn

Hello, there,

The ideal choice would be to be able to combine both solutions and get the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, our support for CDNs is still a bit experimental. We do have a special mode for this, which you can enable in the plugin settings mode and test. However it is still, as I said, experimental.

Now it is really up to you to decide whether it is better using a CDN or a plugin like Adaptive Images. Personally I would go with a CDN (or some other caching solution) if I had a high traffic website, like a news portal, etc. If you have a portfolio website simply to showcase your work and so that people can find you, then perhaps a CDN is too much. But, of course, I am not advising against it.

You will have to make the final choice for yourself!

Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Cheers,
Takis

@takis HI, thanks for your reply!

Could you provide some further information on how to intergrate cloudflare cdn with the experimental cdn mode for this plugin?

Hello, again,

Well, the integration is practically easy. First of all you need to setup the CDN as you normally would (this is independent of the Adaptive Images plugin) and then you need to enable the CDN support option in the Adaptive Images plugin settings page.

If you setup the CDN on a subdomain then maybe you could save yourself some trouble there, because it this is a case that definitely cannot work!

Cheers,
Takis

@takis

Hi I have cloudflare enabled on my site, after attempting to use the adaptive images plugin, images that were around 40 kb are now served at lower resolution but weight ~220kb this is very bad, and also I have around 15 pictures on my pages and on my cache folder there are only 3 that get cached?

Hello, again,

I am sorry to hear this, but I cannot guess why this is happening. I would need to check the site itself to find out. Probably the plugin and the CDN are causing some “misunderstanding” to each other as to what size of the image to deliver each time.

It is not very surprising to hear that the plugin cannot directly with a CDN unfortunately.

Cheers,
Takis

@takis Hi, Here’s an update, I managed to figure out the problem wasn’t caused by this plugin, and fixed it. it did boost my pagespeed insights score from 60 to 93 on mobile because now it is serving the images in the correct size (improvement)

New questions arise, can I configure the plugin not to add query strings at the end of the images? pingdom gives the following message:

“Resources with a “?” in the URL are not cached by some proxy caching servers. Remove the query string and encode the parameters into the URL for the following resources”

Second question is also in pingdom it shows requests with version HTTP/1.1, my site uses https and http/2 enabled on my hosting account, is it possible to configure the images to deliver with http/2?

Hello, there,

I am very happy to hear this. If there is any way you could share your url with me, even in private, I would appreciate it. The only reason I am asking is because the whole CDN thing is quite experimental for our plugin, so, if it actually works for you, it is worth studying for us!

Which brings me to your first question: the url GET parameters at the end of the image are in fact the technique we use to “trick” the browser into requesting lower size images from the CDN. This would not be necessary, if there were no CDN. But with a CDN and the CDN support mode enabled this is definitely necessary. However, it is quite harmless technically although the note that Pingdom makes is correct and it is one of the reasons the CDN support is still experimental and 100% stable. We are researching this, but this is as good as it gets for the time being, I’m afraid.

About your second question, I believe that the one who actually delivers your images in the end is the CDN itself. The plugin intervenes in the front-end to “trick” the browser, as I mentioned before, but it should be the CDN who is responsible for sending them via the desired HTTP version. Does the CDN have such an option in the settings it provides for you?

Cheers,
Takis

@nevma Hi, Okay so for the link to my site please see the email I sent to the email that is published on your website.

Okay so let’s get the query string out of the way, it is acceptable considering the performance boost the adaptive images plugin gains.

The second problem I mention I will check against my hosting and cdn provider and will provide an update regards that topic.

For a new problem I have noticed while monitoring the network tab in devtools, is after using my hosting provider (Siteground) cache plugin (SuperCacher) it is not compatible and thus results in multiple requests of duplicate images, it also requests the large images (500kb instead of 50kb), which is weird.

for now I have disabled the cache plugin in my site, is there any incompatibility with cache plugins or this is specific plugin problem.

I have attempted to use wp super cache but had problem configuring it with my cloudflare’s cdn, so no information here.

@nevma Okay so here’s the first update:

Seems like the slider plugin I am using was causing problem with serving images, the slider plugin is smart slider 3 and it seems to be serving duplicate images

Hi @vertigoooo

You can use Smart Slider 3 with CDN like this: https://smartslider3.helpscoutdocs.com/article/1257-how-to-use-cdn-with-smart-slider
that should work fine without any problems.

Hello, @vertigoooo,

After the private contact that we had and I got the chance to take a look at your website I can confirm that the Adaptive Images plugin is working as good as it possibly is with the CDN.

This means that the plugin manages to alter the urls of images in order to add the necessary GET parameters to them and that the CDN respects and transmits these parameters back to the origin server.

The fact that this function is still “experimental” is because sometimes some images might be delivered in their original file size, if they download too fast (which, in effect, is not too bad). Also this experimental mode cannot support CSS background images yet.

Cheers,
Takis