It looks like the demo has dropped to a 68 because Google is weighting image size in the score more than they used to. I understand part of it is that we are serving the 745×483 image size on mobile. The other half of the equation is that the images are not “losslessly compressed”
What does Google want us to do to “losslessly compress” images? I am exporting them in Pixelmator, then running them through “ImageOptim” where the file size is reduced even more. Yet, when I upload them to the site and wordpress resizes them, the images seem to have about 1 KB of extra data in them that Google doesn’t like.
Any ideas on how to reasonably get these images down in size? It seems impractical to download every thumbnail size of every image off the server, compress it, and then re-upload it. Thanks!
Google want to drive all of us crazy…they make changes to they system lately and since then scores not the same..so ignore what they telling you about the images…
Test ur site on Gtmetrix and u will see the score is way better then what google page giving…
Google has always recommended optimization of images; and this is why tools like Smushit, and modification of the default compression level in the functions.php file are so important, in addition to properly optimizing the images in Photoshop or similar to the lowest possible size that doesn’t suck BEFORE you upload them.
You can generally ignore any mention of any image needing 1kb of optimization. Remember Google’s info is “recommendation” not “the law.” If your site is over 90 desktop and over 80 mobile you don’t need to worry about “slow site speed penalties” which supposedly now exist. For example, for some images we like to embed the copyright info for legal reasons, which is meta data; technically you can make image smaller by removing that. Well, maybe I don’t want to đ
Also, FYI, the speed for an average page in the Newspaper demo, is “94” desktop — but you are correct the demo for mobile is getting “under 70” due to the images on the latest demo not being fully optimized, which I’m sure Radu and folks will address soon as they got a bit sidetracked on the 4.0 fixes and updating the docs.
Thanks, guys! What compression level do you usually drop your photos to before uploading? I’ve been doing 95 because I want my JPG’s crisp, and it doesn’t seem like I’m getting penalized due to the high quality, just due to the fact that they aren’t “fully compressed”…
You just need a plugin like “EWWW Image Optimizer” every time you upload a image the plugin will fixed it for you…
I set my compression level for thumbnails to “50” in my functions.php file, which ensures that all the thumbnails are compressed via Imagemagik on server when created, and no need for intermediate plugin. For a little better quality try “60” or even “70” … but it makes huge difference, and all those thumbnails look fine at 50 from the WordPress thumbnail generation. (See my code for this in the page speed sticky!)
For compression in Photoshop with save-for-web jpegs I usually start with quality factor of “35” with softening of 0.2; with anything that has a lot of “reds” in the image, you’d have to go to 52 to eliminate the horrible artifacts (old mpeg/jpeg compression doesn’t do too well with strong reds…). But try using 52 vs 95 in Photoshop, if you’re using that. Then go down to 40 and see if you can see any difference; usually not.
