Does Image Compression Work? Community Says: Yes

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.

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

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.

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: <https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/page-weight|https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/page-weight> (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 <https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/|https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/>

Thank you guys, I appreciate it!! Will look into these resources!

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.

Designers will complain about the very concept of image compression, but the technology has progressed significantly from this:

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.

@dave297 <https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/page-weight|this> was a great read, thanks for sharing!

Thanks @melidox!