Excellent Image CDN that Noticably Speeds Up my HUGE Image-Heavy Website
What do you like best?
What I like Most about using Gumlet are the results. I run an Image Heavy Website on Shared Web Hosting & Gumlet makes a Dramatic Improvement in my Website Performance & Load Speed. Images make up 75%-80% of my page content and Gumlet helps by reducing my homepage size from 11MB down to 7.5MB! This leads to cutting my load speed in half from 25 seconds, down to 13 seconds. We should be moving to a MUCH faster webserver next month before opening to the public, so we are looking forward to Gumlet to continue helping us out & making a difference in loading all of our 120 Image specific requests - per page load :)
What do you dislike?
There is not a lot to dislike in Gumlet as once you hare finished the initial configuration, there is hardly any more interaction with the software required. Truly plug & play. Other than disabling / enabling it to run performance tests on Pingdom & GTmetrix there is not much else to do after you have finished the initial setup. If there is anything that I dislike it is that Gumlet "takes over" your Lazy Loading capability. To run Gumlet at all, you have to disable other Lazy Load software so that Gumlet can be in control of that department. I would have prefered the option of being able to test & tune the Lazy Load capability of different plugins & using the one that works best - instead of being "forced" into using the Gumlet version. Not a big deal over all, as the results speak for themselves. Our website is so image heavy that GTMetrix errors-out without even completing the scan when Gumlet is deactivated...
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Get It. It already makes a big Difference for us & we can plainly see that they are working hard at improvement & making their product better!
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Gumlet is actually making THE difference in moving from Development, into Testing and Tuning, soon to be open to the Public in 2 weeks. Without Gumlet it takes Pingdom 30 seconds to load our homepage, even worse for real users on normal bandwidth or smart phone data plans. Having Gumlet makes it possible for us to move forward towards our business goal of opening to the public after YEARS of full-time development on a shared hosting plan. Without Gumlet, we the developers, don't have the patience for our webpages to load - much less ask random visitors to spend 30+ seconds waiting for things to appear. Gumlet cuts our Page Load Times in Half, just by installing & configuring it once. Now all we need is to move to better hosting & we should be crossing that bridge in 12 days!
