Homepage cover slideshow, mobile data usage hog?

[mattburris]

Hey all, I'm new here. I did some Googling around but couldn't find anything on this specific subject. If I were to use a lot of cover images for the homepage slideshow, would this incur a large amount of data usage? If so, this could be disconcerting for those visiting the site via a mobile device on a limited data plan. Even if I've optimized the images to ~500kB each, if there's 20 of them that's 10MB of data being downloaded if the visitor sits on the homepage and loads all of them up.

If that's true, I suppose only having a few images would be ideal if you expect a lot of mobile visitors?

 

[Rodolfo]

1. Start by using covers <300KB. Half a megabyte is too much for a cover image.
2. Browsers cache everything and mobile browser cache is even more aggressive. Images will be cached once and from there you won't notice extra data usage.

 

[mattburris]

Ah, good point, I forgot about the caching ability, and didn't know that mobile caches even more aggressively. I'll see about getting the images down to 300KB or less. Thanks!

 

[zomgmike]

Try doing the images as .png and using tinypng dot com to shrink them. I've had images go from like 300Kb to 30Kb with no noticable quality loss. YMMV

 

[Rodolfo]

kraken.io also compress your images, just in case you want to try alternatives.

 

[linkchilla]

Let google work for you. Go to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/, do a PageSpeed Test and download the "optimized content" they provide. Google does a pretty impressive job compressing images.

 

[Rodolfo]

In any case, we should limit how many images will get displayed as cover when the system detects a mobile device. Just in case someone puts too many images in that section.

 

[Rodolfo]

Added in v3.10.4