Device-Agnostic Rendering: Addressing Need for High-Quality Imaging
By: LiquidPixels | August 17, 2021 | 4 Min Read
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The modern web infrastructure presents a unique challenge to retailers. Every seller wants to provide all of their site visitors with high-quality imaging. Accessible, interactive, high fidelity imagery is the best way to showcase products and engage visitors.
However, the internet can be viewed with a plethora of devices—from desktops, to smartphones, to laptops, to tablets—making it very hard to consistently present images at their optimum quality. Each device and every browser come with their own set of technical parameters and pressures that make standardization a real challenge.
Consider: Image optimization is necessary for a site to download and render quickly, especially on a mobile device. According to Google’s research, page bounce increases 32 percent as page load time increases from one second to three seconds.
The obstacle for retailers is that unoptimized image rendering can cause slow load times.
Slowness causes reduced responsiveness, which drives high bounce rates and, by extension, low conversions. In fact, conversion rates drop an average of 4.42 percent for every additional second of load time. To avoid this “heavy website” syndrome, companies need to prioritize responsive website development and design.
To address the market’s need for high quality web images, companies require technology solutions that unlock device-agnostic superior rendering.
What is Device-Agnostic Superior Rendering?
Let us use our own example: LiquiFire® Resolve™.
LiquiFire Resolve is an image rendering program that is part of the LiquiFire Operating System (OS). It automatically identifies device display capabilities and optimizes image presentation without universally increasing bandwidth.
The technology auto-detects every presentation device and renders sharp, vibrant images. LiquiFire Resolve then delivers truly dynamic images for any target device, instantly and on demand.
Tailored for responsive website development and design, each image is automatically customized for multiple users, delivered to multiple web containers, and optimized for multiple displays, all while maintaining image integrity.
Here are some of the key, immediate benefits of a superior rendering solution like LiquiFire Resolve:
1. Instant Optimization
LiquiFire Resolve optimizes images for any presentation environment, including HiDPI displays, such as those found on Retina® Displays. By capturing data from the requesting device, LiquiFire Resolve automatically determines the container and screen resolution.
The tool then adjusts the image resolution based on the container dimensions and the pixel ratio of the device, thus ensuring that the image maintains its quality, regardless of the target device, window, or container size.
2. Instant Improvement
With LiquiFire Resolve’s superior rendering capabilities, you can eliminate all typical production imaging tasks. Users who visit your website will experience faster load times, because images are delivered in the correct proportion and at the optimal resolution; not just larger or smaller.
By empowering LiquiFire Resolve to handle image compression, you automatically determine the best format, ensuring your image quality is never compromised while simultaneously maximizing the transfer speed.
In addition to optimizing static images, LiquiFire Resolve can also integrate with LiquiFire Image Chains™ to deliver customized, high quality web images based on user input.
3. Instant Implementation
LiquiFire Resolve’s implementation is as simple as utilizing a JavaScript library. You can also customize the program to scale each image differently depending on your website’s specific needs. These include:
- maximizing image size,
- changing or maintaining aspect ratio,
- skewing the image, or;
- adjusting the image based on the height or width of the bounding box.
Since the configuration options are tied to a specific image, you can set one image to behave differently than others, even when they are on the same page.
4. WCAG Compliance
LiquiFire OS and its entire technology stack adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set out by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The initiative’s goal is to provide “a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.” Deploying a solution such as LiquiFire Resolve also provides accessibility features to certain groups such as differently-abled individuals.
An accessibility mode button is available in the navigation of each LiquiFire Resolve-powered page, which allows users to increase the contrast ratio of the visible elements. This makes LiquidPixels-empowered websites and pages easier to view for individuals and users who may have difficulty with the default contrast ratio.
The Power of High-Quality Imaging
The importance of device-agnostic superior rendering cannot be understated. It is the only way to achieve a truly responsive website development and design that deliver the experience that shoppers want.
And, as more shopping moves to mobile devices, image optimization is now more important than ever. Our own research reveals that device-agnostic superior rendering can increase page load speed by 28.6 percent, or potentially save retail websites 100+ seconds of total load time. In the world of e-commerce, that is the difference between achieving a positive ROI versus a negative one.
A solution like LiquiFire Resolve provides all of this instantly; from implementation, to improvement, to optimization. By unleashing the power of LiquiFire OS, your website will truly cater to any user’s needs, regardless of the viewing device, with the ability to personalize text or change custom image attributes. As Steve Kristy, CEO of LiquidPixels, puts it:
“Page load time is the critical first step in the shopping experience. Google ranks fast sites higher in search results versus those which are slower. Optimizing the images on a site is painless and automatic, resulting in the most significant improvement in page load speed with the highest ROI across all platforms.”
LiquiFire Resolve, through its superior rendering capabilities, dynamically optimizes and delivers images instantly, on demand.
Check out our own website or our demos here to see LiquiFire Resolve in action or contact us here to learn more.
Is your website underperforming? Click here to conduct a website performance test, and see how much your website can benefit from imagery optimization.
