Cloudflare Mirage (deprecated)

Deprecation notice

Mirage was deprecated on September 15, 2025 and is no longer available.

As an alternative, Cloudflare recommends using lazy loading and responsive images to optimize image performance for all devices.

What was Mirage?

Cloudflare Mirage was a mobile image optimization feature that reduced bandwidth usage and accelerated image loading on slow mobile connections and HTTP/1.

Mirage worked by:

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

Why was it deprecated?

Modern web standards and browser capabilities have evolved to provide native support for many of Mirage's features:

• Native lazy loading with the loading="lazy" HTML attribute.
• Responsive images using srcset and <picture> elements.
• HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 providing better performance.
• Improved mobile networks reducing the need for aggressive optimization.

Migration path

Instead of Mirage, use:

• Polish - Seamlessly optimizes images for all browsers, not only mobile, and keeps images at full resolution.
• Image Resizing - Combined with loading="lazy" and srcset HTML attributes, provides modern responsive image delivery.
• Lazy loading guide - Learn how to implement native lazy loading.
• Responsive images guide - Create images that adapt to different devices.