[nicolasbistolfi]

I personally have been working around web technologies and performance for the last 14 years. I understand where this article is coming from and I actually have to give it some credit, it has a good click-bait title but it's an old solution. I'm tired of reading about this type of solutions, there are thousands of articles exactly like this one.

Reducing the size of your images is just the first step and there are many things you need to consider in order to make your website faster, things you need to solve: - Format: deliver the images in the right format for each browser (e.g. using WebP for Chrome) - Size: What size for each image? What happens on mobile, tablet, desktop and the different screen sizes and pixel ratios (it's not only retina or not) - Quality: Is your image being resized by the browser? Are you using raw files to generate the optimized images? - Thumbnails: Are you also generating thumbnails for listings or smaller versions of your images? How are you going those thumbs to your original images? Do you need to use a Database? - Storage: Where are you going to store those images? - Headers: Caching static assets it's key for recurrent users, are you using Apache or Nginx? Is your setup working well? - CDN: are you using a CDN to deliver those assets? CloudFlare is great but it's not the fastest way to deliver images. What about setting the right configuration for that CDN? How much are you going to spend?

So what's next? Going to one of the API service to optimize images, read their 500 pages of docs to get to resize and crop an image? Ad complex plugins to your backend and have a high dependence integration?

I mean, if you like to add more dependencies to your project, maintain more code, spends hours rebuilding scripts and running cron jobs to update your images, go for it.

That's why about 9 months ago we started working on a new concept, solving all these problems with a service that integrates as easy as a lazy-loading plugin and it solves EVERYTHING about image optimization (and yes, everything that you're talking about on every comment on this HN post).

Don't get me wrong, we have a lot to improve and there are many details of our product that we need to polish, but we believe we've built a solution that solves perfectly all the most important parts of image optimization and delivery. It's not about reducing the image size by 1KB more, it's about everything else and understanding the big picture.

We love feedback and our backlog is prioritized based on our customer needs, let us know what you think.

Here's the link to our startup website: https://piio.co

[ayoisaiah]

Author here. Thanks for the feedback. I agree that what I've done is nothing revolutionary, but the vast majority of websites out there don't have these sort of thing. That's one of the reasons why the average page weight continues to grow every year [0].

Moreover, this solution is good enough for people with small blogs just like mine. Anyone who needs something more involved can use your service or other alternatives.

As for responsive images, I implemented that on my site too although I didn't mention it in the article. I plan to write a follow up article on that topic soon.

On a side note, you might want to bump up the font size of the navigation links on your site. They're too faint.

[0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

[nicolasbistolfi]

Totally agree with the page weight and that we're missing something. Increasing page weight when we're also increasing connection speeds is only bad when the first one increases more rapidly, and I believe that we're under that situation.

Would love to connect to chat about this and for sure I'll read the follow-up article.

Thanks for the feedback too!

[contingencies]

Some things you didn't mention are domain resolution latency and caching, browser request parallelization, delivery protocol selection and reducing the raw number of content requests. Basically you are entering CDN territory here.

[nicolasbistolfi]

That's why I added the CDN part, didn't wanted to go to deep on that issue. As you're saying CDN it's a big part of the image delivery, even more important than having a great algorithm to compress those images. We've found that after passing a certain threshold, eg. the image being < 200KB the download time it's not something important, so the size doesn't matter that much, the TTFB (time to first byte) is crucial.

There's also a difference between performance, speed and actual perception of speed, but that is very hard to measure and maybe it's an issue for another topic.