Member Avatar for fabricjam.com

Hi all,

I am currently paying a company to host my new website, but am a little concerned with the speed in which it takes to download images. As it is an online auction website, it is essential that the speed is optimized.

I went onto vertain.com who provided me with the following Speed test results:

URL:
Measured Speed (using 10 mbps T3 connection): 10.44 sec

Compare with other sites:

Samples from our benchmarks, showing average speed (in sec) for the last 12 months:
google.com 0.6 arin.net 0.7 apple.com 1.1 microsoft.com 1.2 fedex.com 2.3 2.9 cnn.com 4.4 weather.com 5.9

So its obvious that its a little slow!

How do I speed it up in the most cost effective way?

Thanks :-)

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by hughv

Dani AI

Generated

Following ’s observation and ’s diagnosis that the image delivery is the main bottleneck, a focused, low-cost approach will give the biggest win: change what the browser actually downloads, and when it downloads it.

Make the image pipeline do the work. Generate real thumbnails and medium/large variants at upload (don’t rely on HTML to scale originals). Strip photo metadata, save progressive JPEGs (or modern WebP/AVIF with JPEG fallbacks), and set sensible quality values so files stay small but look good. Automate this server-side with ImageMagick/GD or a simple script so every product has appropriately sized files ready for listing, detail and zoom views.

Improve delivery and perceived speed. Serve listing thumbnails in the listing pages and lazy-load off-screen images so the browser only fetches what’s visible. Use responsive techniques (srcset/sizes) so devices get images sized to their viewport. Put static images on a cookieless host or CDN and enable long-cache headers with cache-busting filenames so repeat visitors download far less. On the server, enable compression and an HTTP/2 (or newer) capable stack to reduce request overhead.

Quick checklist to validate changes: measure before/after with the browser Network tab (total bytes, number of requests, TTFB), confirm thumbnails are actually small, confirm lazy-loading defers off-screen downloads, and check caching headers. If the current host can’t run image processing or HTTP/2, consider a low-cost CDN or a host with on-the-fly image resizing. Small, systematic changes here typically cut page weight and load times dramatically for image-heavy auction pages.

Recommended Answers

All 6 Replies

Member Avatar for hughv

Objectively, it loads plenty fast for me on my FIOS 15/2 connection.
Disappointing that there's no lingerie section, though.
I think you'll find this has more to do with your connection than the server.

Member Avatar for sittas87

...is what i was thinking

Member Avatar for fabricjam.com

;-)

I still think that the images download very slowly.... compared to e-bay and I have a fast connection?

Member Avatar for hughv

Some of your images are very large-Typically, you want to keep them under 50K, but some are over 2 MB. Use a program like Irfanview or Photoshop to reduce the size.

Member Avatar for fabricjam.com

do you mean in search results? because those images are small... and thats where I find it is slowest downloading

Member Avatar for hughv

Your images may look small, but that's because you're using HTML to re-size them. The server still must load the original image at its original size.
This image:

for instance, is 2.12 MB.
I haven't gone through the whole site, but I did find several this large. Many of your images have been properly sized, so just re-size the rest of them.

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