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.

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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

	Free	Pro	Business	Enterprise
Availability	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

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Image formats compatible with Mirage

Mirage will work with the following image formats:

• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .png
• .gif
• .img

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Enable Mirage

Note

If you send a Content Security Policy (CSP) header that restricts where scripts can be loaded, you will need to ensure ajax.cloudflare.com is enabled. For example, to allow scripts from your own domain and ajax.cloudflare.com enter the following: script-src 'self' ajax.cloudflare.com;

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.

Note

To use this feature on specific hostnames - instead of across your entire zone - use a configuration rule.

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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: