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Melissa De Oña
Melissa De Oña
Aug 17, 2023, 10:33 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Has any one seen any benefits of reducing image sizes (as per screaming frog’s reports) while using an image compression plugin? From screaming frog:
The sizes the Spider reports come from the content-length HTTP response header the server provides
We have seen cases where this does not match with the actual downloaded image size. This could make sense if the compression plugin doesn’t update whatever meta data is used by the server in providing this.
This wouldn’t impact the actual speed so there wouldn’t be a speed advantage to having the content-length match the real size, although I don’t know if there are other potential downsides.
The Content-Length header indicates the size of the message body, in bytes, sent to the recipient.
Content-Length - HTTP | MDN
Forwarded thread from another channel:
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Aug 17, 2023, 10:37 AM
I don’t recall which plugin/tool that we used when I was at TMO - but we did see improvements when image compression was used on the marketing landing pages. Design insisted on using fully immersive imagery and the files (esp. GIFs) were over 5MB and there were several on a page.
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Aug 17, 2023, 10:39 AM
we set a page size limit of 2MB which I know is still massive but compared to where we were starting - some pages over 30-40MB that was pretty significant
Kyle Faber
Kyle Faber
Aug 17, 2023, 10:46 AM
I’ve always used imageoptim for compression prior to upload. Bulk optimized an image library of over 12k images and it helped improve page performance quite a bit. This was for a side project at the time, about 3 years ago, so don’t recall or have actual #s off hand.
Dave Smart
Dave Smart
Aug 17, 2023, 1:38 PM
Sounds like something is a little broken on the servers, Content-Length should be the size of the response minus the headers, there shouldn't be based on any meta data really, but I've certainly come across on the fly optimisation scripts that don't send or send wrong Content-Length.
Doesn't really matter too much if you know the files coming across the network are of a reasonable size. Heck you don't need a Content-Length header at all really. It's not required.
But in general smaller page weight is a good thing, and images are the leading cause of bloat still: (sorry if this is a bit self promotional, don't mean it to be).
From an SEO perspective, probably not a huge deal, from a web performance, so a small SEO factor, can be a huge deal if images are massive.
From not asking your users to pay significant cash just to view your page, it can be sobering what those 10-20mb of images might cost some folks
Page Weight chapter of the 2022 Web Almanac covering why page weight matters, bandwidth, complex pages, page weight over time, page requests, and file formats.
Page Weight | 2022 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
Melissa De Oña
Melissa De Oña
Aug 17, 2023, 4:43 PM
Thank you guys, I appreciate it!! Will look into these resources!
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Aug 17, 2023, 4:56 PM
A loooot of systems have built in image compression or easily added plug-ins by now. For the rest, there are services that devops can integrate. If you don't have devops involved, then you're likely operating on a scale where image compression is a trivial extra step in your manual process. Either way, there's no reason not to use lossless image compression for publicly accessible content, and there's rarely a reason to not use slightly more aggressive image compression that's largely invisible to the human eye. Even if there were absolutely zero SEO benefit, it's just nicer for the user and less load on the servers.
Boris Kuslitskiy
Boris Kuslitskiy
Aug 17, 2023, 4:58 PM
Designers will complain about the very concept of image compression, but the technology has progressed significantly from this:
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Aug 17, 2023, 7:28 PM
Of all the designers I’ve worked with - there is only one that was able to spot a compressed image about 15%. It was quite impressive that his eye was that sharp/keen.
Melissa De Oña
Melissa De Oña
Aug 18, 2023, 4:09 PM
@dave297 was a great read, thanks for sharing!
Page Weight chapter of the 2022 Web Almanac covering why page weight matters, bandwidth, complex pages, page weight over time, page requests, and file formats.
Page Weight | 2022 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

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