NFT trading is becoming mainstream these days. Big brands like Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton, and even Taco Bell are getting in on the action. With the NFT universe growing, so has the development of the NFT marketplace. Due to the extremely high-value nature of the transactions conducted on these marketplaces (last year alone, Christie's sold an NFT by the artist Beeple for over $69 million, and Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for over $2.9 million), the competition between marketplaces is only intensifying. It's more important than ever for NFT marketplaces to improve performance and stay ahead of the competition.
The Need for Speed, Discoverability, and Safety
If you are building an NFT marketplace, you will likely face challenges similar to other visual media-heavy websites like e-commerce and social media. They can be largely bucketed into three categories:
- Page speed and user experience
- SEO and discoverability
- Credibility and trustworthiness
Page speed and user experience: Users increasingly demand a fast web or app experience in all online marketplaces. Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online platform. Delivering an optimized and responsive visual experience dramatically impacts your audience's chance of making a trade and their willingness to continue using the platform and refer others.
SEO and discoverability: The speed of your page performance impacts engagement rates and heavily influences your search ranking and traffic. With the release of its Core Web Vitals (CWV) report, Google is making it clear that its powerful search algorithm is heavily weighted toward the speed with which elements load or how long it takes for a browser to turn a page click into action.
Credibility and trustworthiness: Like many platforms with a large volume of user-generated content, NFT marketplaces face the challenge of content safety and copyright infringement. It's vital to have content moderation. If your site is caught with content that violates the guidelines, it can damage the trust of both buyers and sellers.
Competition is intensifying; with so much growth and evolution in the space, it’s crucial to find a scalable solution that sets you up for success now and in the future. The good news is that visual media processing is the solution. We’ll show you why and 7 ways to do it.
7 Ways to Improve NFT Marketplace Performance
Image Compression
With proper compression, you can reduce the size of your image files without losing perceptible visual quality. This will help images on your website or app load faster.Image Resizing
Images are often served much larger than needed for a page, which adds to the page weight and slows down page loading. By resizing your images appropriately, you deliver the optimal dimensions without loading extra bytes of data.Image Format Conversion
You can further reduce page weight and load time by converting existing image files to AVIF or WebP. AVIF and WebP are next-gen image formats developed by Netflix and Google, respectively. imgix customers have seen file size reduction by an average of 60% from JPEG to AVIF, with virtually no loss in quality.Converting Animated GIFs to Videos
Many NFTs are created as animated GIFs. However, with the same animated content, a GIF is much larger and loads slower than MP4 or WebM. You can set MP4 and WebM videos to autoplay and loop like GIFs. By converting an animated GIF to MP4 or WebM, you get the benefit of compression without sacrificing user experience.Responsive Design
For the best user experience, your website and all its elements should dynamically adjust based on the browser and device. For responsive imagery, resolution switching and art direction adjustments are two main tactics.Asset Management and Content Moderation
Being able to search, visualize, and organize your NFTs in one central source of truth can help you significantly improve content moderation. If your asset management system provides content alerts, it will enhance your ability to ensure content safety and build user trust.Use a Fast and Reliable CDN Built for Images and Videos
The last mile, both figuratively and literally, is content delivery. By using a globally distributed CDN with intelligent caching and visual media processing, you are significantly more likely to provide visitors with a fast and reliable experience.
The Results
The best part is that you can easily implement all 7 recommendations using imgix. In our tutorial webinar, we created a sample NFT gallery. The original PageSpeed performance score was 68. After implementing some of the techniques using imgix, the PageSpeed score jumped to 100 points.
Building and maintaining an NFT Marketplace comes with many challenges. Fortunately, imgix can help. imgix is an end-to-end visual media platform that enables websites and apps to optimize, transform, and deliver videos and images at scale. With our Rendering API and Video API, you can effortlessly compress assets and improve page speed without compromising the visual quality. With our Asset Manager, you can monitor, search, and tag content to enhance customer trust.
