A Look at the Cloudinary WordPress Plugin

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(This is a sponsored post.)

Cloudinary (the media hosting and optimization service) has a brand new version (v3) of its WordPress plugin that has really nailed it. First, a high-level look at the biggest things this plugin does:

• It takes over your media handling. Images and video are served by Cloudinary instead of your own server, which is good for a whole host of reasons. But don’t worry, your assets are also on your own server, so there is no lock-in.
• It serves your images and video as performantly as possible. Everything is optimized, served in the best format, and use techniques like responsive images and lazy loading, all while providing a good loading experience. All together, those things are massive for performance.
• It provides and image gallery block with lots of functionality.

Setting it up is as easy as copy and pasting from your Cloudinary account.

So, yes, you need a Cloudinary account. You can check out the programmable media plans here. There is a free tier that will likely work for many sites and paid plans that will cover sites that have heavy media needs, of which you’ll likely find the pricing amicable. Once you have your account, you pop the connection string (from your dashboard) into this quick onboarding wizard and you’re basically done. The default settings are good.

You could do literally nothing else and the plugin will work its magic, but it’s fun to look through all the settings.

Here are the general settings:

Those two (default) settings are important. Auto sync is nice in that all your images (even your entire existing media library) is synced up to Cloudinary and stays in sync. This is necessary to host your images (and do fancy optional stuff like “transforms”) but you could otherwise think of it as a backup. When you use “Cloudinary and WordPress” as the Storage setting, it means that media will be uploaded to your own server and Cloudinary. That’s what I would highly recommend, but if you’re in a situation where, say, you have very limited or no storage on your WordPress host, you could have the images go straight to Cloudinary (only).

In the Image settings, you can see two of Cloudinary’s most powerful weapons: f_auto and q_auto, standing for “auto image formatting” and “auto quality compression.” Those are defaults I’d highly recommend leaving alone. It means that any browser on any device gets the best possible format of the image, and Cloudinary adjusts the quality as appropriate for that image. Cloudinary has very good tech for doing this, so let it do it.

The “doing images right” checklist is a thing.

Remember, we blogged it just recently. Host them on a CDN. Optimze them. Serve them in the best possible format for the requesting browser. Use responsive images. Lazy load them. None of those things are trivial, and that’s just a partial list. The good news is: this plugin does all that stuff for you, does it well, and does it without you having to think too much about it.

I like seeing the output. This is where the rubber meets the road. From this I can see that responsive images are implemented correctly and lots of different sizes are available. I can see the the image sources are pointing at the Cloudinary CDN. I can see lazy loading is implemented and working. I can see the width and height attributes are there as they should be to ensure space is reserved for the images during loading. This is everything.

It goes the extra mile by hosting the images the used by the theme as well.

Heck, it replaces CSS background-images in your theme’s stylesheet with Cloudinary-hosted versions. That’s… amazing. There must be some real clever WordPress filter stuff going on.

The Gallery Block is just gravy.

I like seeing this in there:

Why? It shows that this plugin is part of modern WordPress. Block editor WordPress. The block itself is simple, but useful. It shows images in a variety of useful layouts with a “lightbox”-like effect (wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve typed the word lightbox). Hey, sometimes you just need a dang image gallery and you might as well use one that is well done.

Who am I to say?

Just a lowly blogger, I suppose. But I can tell you I’ve been watching this evolve for quite a while. A ways back, I had implemented a hand-rolled Cloudinary integration here on CSS-Tricks because I wanted all this stuff. I ultimately had to give up on it as it was more technical debt than I could maintain.

The previous versions of the WordPress plugin were better, but it’s not until now, v3, where this integration is truly nailed.

Shortly after that time I tore down my custom integration, I blogged “Workflow Considerations for Using an Image Management Service” and outlined what I thought the (rather high) bar would be for integrating a third-party image host. It was a lot to ask, and I wasn’t really sure if anyone would find the incentive and motivation to do it all. Well, Cloudinary has done it here. This is as perfect a media management plugin as I could imagine.

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