I am making a website, with around 6 large images (around 660px square) on each page. I intend to save the images as ‘high res’ twice the size and increase the compression.
Broadly speaking the visitors will have fairly modern broadband speeds.
Is there a rule of thumb to say how big (in KB) an image should be / a page should be?
In terms of speed v’s quality, I want to be closer to the quality end rather than the speed end.
If this was your home page (if people were “parachuting” into it without any warning or expectation about the size) then I would urge you to reconsider this approach. But if you are building this as a portfolio page, or something similar, and people had an inkling that it might be large, then you could go as high as 2 or 3 megabytes without scaring off anyone with a modern setup. Note that this does not apply to mobile browsers, which are starved for memory and may not be able to display something that large without stumbling or downsampling it on the fly.
Walter
On Jan 25, 2014, at 6:17 AM, Mark wrote:
Bit like how long is a piece of string, but…
I am making a website, with around 6 large images (around 660px square) on each page. I intend to save the images as ‘high res’ twice the size and increase the compression.
Broadly speaking the visitors will have fairly modern broadband speeds.
Is there a rule of thumb to say how big (in KB) an image should be / a page should be?
In terms of speed v’s quality, I want to be closer to the quality end rather than the speed end.
waltd, I appreciate your answer to Mark. In a similar vein, I put a different photo image on each of my pages. I try to keep each page’s photo image at about 25K or smaller. Am I being too conservative? I could get better photo clarity at around 50K, but would that noticeably slow down the page’s load time?
Nobody asked me, but depending on what else would exist on each page, I
would accept 50-100k images.
On Sunday, January 26, 2014, Jim Feeney email@hidden wrote:
waltd, I appreciate your answer to Mark. In a similar vein, I put a
different photo image on each of my pages. I try to keep each page’s photo
image at about 25K or smaller. Am I being too conservative? I could get
better photo clarity at around 50K, but would that noticeably slow down the
page’s load time?
If it helps, my pages are often around 100–500 kb (roughly up to half a mb) and they load just fine on every computer I’ve tried them on.
So 50k is absolutely miniscule.
I overhead a conversation recently with someone saying that page sizes aren’t that important any longer - with people being able to stream live TV, downloading a static website is easy peesy. Guess the problem comes when someone tries to view the site on a 2G or 3G phone. It all depends on your visitors.
Walter reckons that a portfolio site could go as large as 2 or 3mb.
my pages are often around 100–500 kb (roughly up to half a mb) and they load just fine on every computer I’ve tried them on.
It is generally accepted that pages should certainly be sub 1Mb these days - preferably closer to 1/2Mb. And if targeted at Mobile users definitely closer to 500kb.
However there are exceptions - as Walter outlined if a visitor is expecting a graphics heavy page(s) then OK.
But what is not acceptable is a landing page that an unsuspecting visitor comes across that is slow to load. Besides the fact that the visitor wont wait for the page to finish loading before going somewhere else.
So 50k is absolutely miniscule.
This was meant for a single image - not a whole page.
Walter reckons that a portfolio site could go as large as 2 or 3mb.
I saw some statistics recently that people make the decision to stay/go in the first tenth of a second. They may confirm/act on that decision much (relatively speaking) later, but the initial impression is just that fast. This is why the high-traffic sites sweat every single byte, put the JavaScript at the bottom of the HTML code, use HTML text for every living thing, set images as backgrounds, in the CSS. All trying to get the initial DOM load even as early as possible so the browser starts painting the screen immediately.
Walter
On Jan 27, 2014, at 5:06 AM, DeltaDave wrote:
But what is not acceptable is a landing page that an unsuspecting visitor comes across that is slow to load. Besides the fact that the visitor wont wait for the page to finish loading before going somewhere else.