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Cloudflare Mirage

Cloudflare Mirage reduces bandwidth used by images in mobile browsers. It can accelerate loading of image-heavy websites on very slow mobile connections and HTTP/1.

It does this by:

  • Replacing images with low-resolution thumbnails, which are bundled together into one file.
  • Acting as a lazy loader, deferring loading of higher-resolution images until they become visible.

JavaScript must be enabled for Mirage to work.


​​ Comparison

  • Polish seamlessly optimizes images for all browsers, not only mobile, and keeps images at full resolution.
  • Image Resizing together with loading="lazy" and srcset HTML attributes can achieve similar results as Mirage, but requires markup changes to implement.

​​ Availability

FreeProBusinessEnterprise

Availability

NoYesYesYes

​​ Image formats compatible with Mirage

Mirage will work with the following image formats:

  • .jpg
  • .jpeg
  • .png
  • .gif
  • .img

​​ Enable Mirage

To enable Mirage image optimization for your entire domain:

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard.
  2. Select your account and zone.
  3. Go to Speed > Optimization > Image Optimization.
  4. For Mirage, switch the toggle to On.

​​ Test Mirage

Mirage’s features for Mobile Browser optimization are triggered based on high latency and poor network connections. You can test Mirage by making a request to your domain using a mobile  user-agent string and one of the following flags with your domain in your mobile browser:

EXAMPLE.COM/?forcepreload

To run the pre-loader only and serve degraded images on the page enter:

EXAMPLE.COM/?forcepreloadonly

Here is an example where Mirage 2 is triggered by a ?forcepreloadonly flag. The notable image degradation is a sign that Mirage is working:

Blog post regarding the launch of Mirage.