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Leo has done an amazing job of building Symbiostock as a lean, fast theme already, so please don’t take this as anything other than a suggestion of how to further improve things in an era where speed is becoming a huge factor in SEO/SERP.
I think one of the biggest improvements that could be made is to somehow run the mini pics (the thumbnails for each image) as well as the main image preview pic through an image optimiser script to losslessly compress them more. According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights for instance, my mini pics could be compressed by a further 50-60% per pic! Imagine the speed increase this would provide when fetching network search results and displaying about 100 images on a search results page!
Cascoly/AJT or anyone else with PHP/coding experience – can this be done on the server side relatively easily, perhaps when the images are initially imported to a site and the previews etc are created? Is there a script available?
Well thats my #1 suggestion for improving speed from here on. What about everyone else, any ideas? 🙂
EDIT: Also, has anyone that is using Bluehost hosting turned on the CloudFlare option? Is it working well? Cheers.
View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised in a few months. 😉
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
@thp wrote:
Leo has done an amazing job of building Symbiostock as a lean, fast theme already, so please don’t take this as anything other than a
EDIT: Also, has anyone that is using Bluehost hosting turned on the CloudFlare option? Is it working well? Cheers.
I hadn’t looked into this – I’m on Bluehost – so I just went to look at CloudFlare’s intro video and then took a look at their plans:
http://www.cloudflare.com/plans
I can’t imagine forking over $20 a month at the moment, but free sounds OK. I guess the question would then be – what is the downside? Or even the potential downside?
I googled cloudflare problems to see what would come up:
http://wpguidance.com/549/typical-cloudflare-hosting-problems/
http://www.organicweb.com.au/17147/wordpress/cloudflare-google-pagespeed/
http://www.x-pose.org/2012/02/speed-up-your-site-disable-cloudflare/
I’m not sure I have the expertise to evaluate these complaints (some of which are a few years back, admittedly), and also don’t like the idea of a component that could decrease reliability even if it sped things up when it was functioning.
Thanks for bringing the topic up, but I’m going to be chicken and see if someone else wants to go first 🙂
@leo – now you’ve piqued my curiosity!
@thp wrote:
According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights for instance, my mini pics could be compressed by a further 50-60% per pic!
Yes, but will they look good? You can always compress an image to the extreme, but then it will look pixelated and most buyers would be put off by the image.
@shazamimages wrote:
@thp wrote:
According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights for instance, my mini pics could be compressed by a further 50-60% per pic!
Yes, but will they look good? You can always compress an image to the extreme, but then it will look pixelated and most buyers would be put off by the image.
Leo – You’ve got me keen to see whats coming mate!
Shazam – as I said above “an image optimiser script to losslessly compress them” – thats the point, images can be loselessly compressed without any visible degradation. of course we don’t want bad looking images. But we do want a lightning fast user experience, and a great Google PageSpeed score which will help with page rank.
View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.
@joannsnover wrote:
@thp wrote:
Leo has done an amazing job of building Symbiostock as a lean, fast theme already, so please don’t take this as anything other than a
EDIT: Also, has anyone that is using Bluehost hosting turned on the CloudFlare option? Is it working well? Cheers.
I hadn’t looked into this – I’m on Bluehost – so I just went to look at CloudFlare’s intro video and then took a look at their plans:
http://www.cloudflare.com/plans
I can’t imagine forking over $20 a month at the moment, but free sounds OK. I guess the question would then be – what is the downside? Or even the potential downside?
I googled cloudflare problems to see what would come up:
http://wpguidance.com/549/typical-cloudflare-hosting-problems/
http://www.organicweb.com.au/17147/wordpress/cloudflare-google-pagespeed/
http://www.x-pose.org/2012/02/speed-up-your-site-disable-cloudflare/
I’m not sure I have the expertise to evaluate these complaints (some of which are a few years back, admittedly), and also don’t like the idea of a component that could decrease reliability even if it sped things up when it was functioning.
Thanks for bringing the topic up, but I’m going to be chicken and see if someone else wants to go first 🙂
@leo – now you’ve piqued my curiosity!
I tried Cloudflare on another site of mine about 1 year ago on a different host and had all sorts of problems, so turned it off quickly. So I am a bit afraid to try it now too.
View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.
@thp wrote:
@shazamimages wrote:
@thp wrote:
According to Google’s PageSpeed Insights for instance, my mini pics could be compressed by a further 50-60% per pic!
Yes, but will they look good? You can always compress an image to the extreme, but then it will look pixelated and most buyers would be put off by the image.
Shazam – as I said above “an image optimiser script to losslessly compress them” – thats the point, images can be loselessly compressed without any visible degradation. of course we don’t want bad looking images. But we do want a lightning fast user experience, and a great Google PageSpeed score which will help with page rank.
At the moment, Symbiostock uses JPGs, which is a lossy compression. If you want a lossless compression, then Symbiostock would need to be rewritten to use a different image format (such as PNG).
You could ” losslessly compress” the jpg minipics by stripping (part of) the metadata, which at their small pixel size is a good percentage of the file size.
Yes, but will they look good? You can always compress an image to the extreme, but then it will look pixelated and most buyers would be put off by the image.
Shazam – as I said above “an image optimiser script to losslessly compress them” – thats the point, images can be loselessly compressed without any visible degradation. of course we don’t want bad looking images. But we do want a lightning fast user experience, and a great Google PageSpeed score which will help with page rank.
At the moment, Symbiostock uses JPGs, which is a lossy compression. If you want a lossless compression, then Symbiostock would need to be rewritten to use a different image format (such as PNG).
Technically maybe yes, but in reality, no. Read here: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/OptimizeImages
Quote from that page:
Use an image compressor
Several tools are available that perform further, lossless compression on JPEG and PNG files, with no effect on image quality. For JPEG, we recommend jpegtran or jpegoptim
View my portfolio at THPStock Direct via Microstock Man. I also do Web Design & Graphic Design.
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