Cloudinary – Deliver Images and Videos at Scale Plugin
Boost the performance of your WordPress site by optimizing your images and videos with the Cloudinary WordPress Plugin. WordPress developers, content …
Boost the performance of your WordPress site by optimizing your images and videos with the Cloudinary WordPress Plugin. WordPress developers, content creators, and administrators can efficiently create, manage and deliver images and videos. The plugin scales from individual blogs to enterprise sites that deliver hundreds of thousands of images and videos and that need to be accessed across a variety of devices.
What can Cloudinary do for you?
Automatically optimize and transform all your new and existing images and videos through best-in-class algorithms that improve site performance and SEO rankings. Check out some examples!
Rapidly edit assets, via AI, that deepen engagement through capabilities such as smart cropping, thumbnail generation, automated transcoding, and more.
Deliver dynamically created responsive images across various devices and different resolutions.
Utilize lazy loading and customizable placeholders to load images that are viewed by your users.
Support both headless and UI-based WordPress deployments, maintaining flexibility in website development.
Maintain compatibility with popular page builders.
Provide end-to-end support for the WooCommerce plugin.
Stream videos using the Cloudinary Video Player, featuring advanced capabilities to enhance user engagement.
Present a responsive and interactive Product Gallery for creating captivating visual experiences.
About
Cloudinary’s award-winning plugin makes automating your image and video workflows easy, offering a variety of features. Supporting nearly two million developers and over 10,000 customers, Cloudinary enables companies to manage, transform, optimize and deliver image and video assets. The Cloudinary Plugin supports all these capabilities, providing users with a true plug-and-play solution. Getting started takes only minutes using the intuitive onboarding wizard.
After deployment, users can access a dashboard that provides insights into optimization metrics and data usage. The Cloudinary Plugin is based on an architecture that supports any type of site including business, enterprise and personal.
Optimize your site performance and user experience by achieving faster page load times and implementing advanced auto-responsive delivery. This not only improves your Google page rankings but also enhances Core Web Vitals, and Lighthouse scores. By leveraging features such as video and image optimization, advanced responsive design, customizable lazy loading, and built-in CDN support, you can publish content faster while consistently delivering engaging user experiences. The Plugin supports both headless and UI-based development models, and allows you to customize development and extend functionality with the Cloudinary Plugin actions and filters. Moreover, you can create engaging visual experiences with automated quality and encoding settings, video and image resizing and cropping via AI, comprehensive transformations and effects, and seamless delivery to any device in any resolution or pixel density.
Getting Started
To use the Cloudinary Plugin and all the functionality that comes with it, you will need to have a Cloudinary Account. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up now for a free Cloudinary Programmable Media account. You’ll start with generous usage limits and when your requirements grow, you can easily upgrade to a plan that best fits your needs. Upon account creation you can plug in your account credentials and customize your configurations as desired. That’s it.
Visit the plugins page within your dashboard and select Add New.
Search for Cloudinary.
Select Cloudinary – Image and Video Optimization, Manipulation, and Delivery from the list.
Activate Cloudinary from your Plugins page.
Go to Setting up below.
Install Cloudinary manually
Upload the Cloudinary folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Activate the Cloudinary plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
Go to Setting up below.
Setting up
Once the plugin is activated, go to the Cloudinary settings.
You’ll be prompted to Add your Cloudinary URL.
Enter your Cloudinary environment variable URL, the format should be cloudinary://{API_Key}:{API_Secret}@{Cloud_Name} and can be found in the Account Details section of the Cloudinary Console Dashboard, then click save.
After saving, additional settings tabs will be available.
Note If you have two factor authentication configured for your account, you will need to open the Cloudinary Console and login before you can use the Cloudinary plugin. Your site is now setup to start using Cloudinary.
Screenshots
Streamline your creative workflow
Optimize your site in a two-step wizard
Gain insight into how your assets are performing
Global Image Transformation settings
Automatically deliver Responsive Images
Improve web performance with Lazy Loading assets
Cloudinary video player settings
Display assets in a customizable and responsive product gallery
Folder and Syncing Settings
Need help? We’ve got you covered
DAM-Powered Media Library
Configure your assets to be automatically optimized out-of-the-box
FAQ
Do I need a Cloudinary account to use the Cloudinary plugin and can I try it out for free?
To use the Cloudinary plugin and all the functionality that comes with it, you will need to have a Cloudinary Account. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up now for a free Cloudinary Programmable Media account. You’ll start with generous usage limits and when your requirements grow, you can easily upgrade to a plan that best fits your needs.
I’ve installed the Cloudinary plugin, what happens now?
If you left all the settings as default, all your current media will begin syncing with Cloudinary. Once syncing is complete, your media will be optimized and delivered using Cloudinary URLs and you should begin seeing improvements in performance across your site.
Which file types are supported?
Most common media files are supported for optimization and delivery by Cloudinary. For free accounts, you will not be able to deliver PDF or ZIP files by default for security reasons. If this is a requirement, please contact our support team who can help activate this for you.
To deliver additional file types via Cloudinary, you can extend the functionality of the plugin using the actions and filters the plugin exposes for developers
Does the Cloudinary plugin require an active WordPress REST API connection?
To function correctly, the Cloudinary plugin requires an active WordPress REST API connection. Ensure your WordPress setup, including multisite or headless configurations, has the REST API enabled and active for seamless plugin operation.
I’m having an incompatibility issue with a theme, plugin, or hosting environment, what can I do?
We’re compatible with most other plugins so we expect it to work absolutely fine. If you do have any issues, please contact our support team who will help resolve your issue.
Can I use the Cloudinary plugin for my eCommerce websites?
Yes, the Cloudinary plugin has full support for WooCommerce. We also have additional functionality that allows you to add a fully optimized Product Gallery.
Why are my images loading locally and not from Cloudinary?
Your images may be loading locally for a number of reasons:
The asset has been selected to be delivered from WordPress. You can update this for each asset via the WordPress Media Library.
Your asset is stored outside of your WordPress storage.
The asset is not properly synced with Cloudinary. You can find the sync status of your assets in the WordPress Media Library.
How do I handle a CLDBind error which is causing issues with lazy loading?
The Cloudinary lazy loading scripts must be loaded in the page head. Ensure your site or any 3rd party plugins are not setup to move these scripts.
Changelog
3.1.8 (25 March 2024)
Fixes and Improvements:
Added the Cloudinary for WordPress Administrators course as part of the plugin need help section
Added individual “Need Help? Watch Lessons Here!” call-outs at the top of every section as a tool tip, pointing to specific lessons where that section is covered
Updated the FAQ section
Upgraded the Cloudinary Video Player to v1.11.1
Fixed Cloudinary\tmpfile() undefined error log when importing assets from Cloudinary