Large Galleries Now Load in a Fraction of the Time
Photo pages were the slowest thing on an actor portfolio website. They are not any more. A gallery of forty images now starts showing you pictures in well under a second on a normal phone connection.
What was actually happening
The old gallery asked the browser for every image on the page at full size, immediately, whether or not any of them were on screen. On a page with forty headshots at two or three megabytes each, that is a hundred megabytes of request queued before the visitor has scrolled a pixel.
Browsers cope with this by making the visitor wait. On a laptop on office wifi it felt sluggish. On a phone on mobile data it felt broken, and the visitor left.
The three changes
- Images load as you scroll. Only what is on screen, plus a little ahead, is requested. Scrolling to the bottom of a long gallery still loads everything, but by then the visitor has decided to stay.
- The right size is sent. A thumbnail in a grid is a few hundred pixels wide. It now receives an image a few hundred pixels wide instead of the four thousand pixel original scaled down by the browser.
- Space is reserved. Each image's slot is sized before the image arrives, so the page does not jump around as things appear. This is the single most irritating behavior on the modern web and it is entirely avoidable.
The measurable part
On a representative gallery of thirty-two photographs, the page went from roughly 46 megabytes of initial download to under 900 kilobytes. Time to the first visible photograph went from about six seconds to under one on a mid-range phone.
Why this is an SEO feature as well as a comfort one
Page speed is a ranking signal, and it is one of the few that an individual actor can genuinely control. More importantly it is a bounce signal: people who wait six seconds mostly do not wait six seconds. Our SEO guide and the piece on mobile optimization both put speed near the top, and this is why.
Nothing to switch on
Every existing gallery got this automatically, on every design. You do not need to re-upload anything. If you want to go further, the related work is in moving image hosting to a CDN, modern image formats and automatic resizing on upload.
Want somewhere to put your photographs? Create a free actor website.
