So, one aspect of “responsive” design (good and bad), is that it’s better to load a 25kb image once than load the 25kb image once and the 12kb image together and switch those out on viewport. Better to load the 25kb image ONCE, then resize to fit the aspect you’re looking at when you look at it.
I agree it’s best to load the image only once. All I’m saying (and is what I believe Google Pagespeed is saying) is that we should request the version of the image that is best fit to the screen at it’s current orientation, and then if the device changes the viewport, the image will be resized locally, which is essentially what newspaper does now at a certain level.
For example, if I load my homepage and resize the browser window down to 767 pixels, I see this image which is only 326px wide being displayed at over 700 px wide WITHOUT reloading the image, as seen in the screenshot below, second image down:
Does that make sense? If someone really was bothered by the pixelated images, they’d probably realize that they could simply re-orient their device to how they loaded the page or simply reload the page. It seems terribly inefficient to me to have every single person download a high-resolution image on the off-chance that they will flip from portrait to landscape while viewing the page…
The other benefit of using the larger image is for retina/HD displays on a mobile device which have higher pixel count than desktop; so again, if you do the pixel math, a 700×500 image on a screen with double the pixel count, loaded half size, would still provide the same number of pixels when shown half size — without having to load alternate retina/HD version of image or use “image stacks.”
I agree, it does look nice on “Retina” phone screens, which is why I disabled my retina plugin on mobile devices. I think it would simply be a better solution to have Newspaper serve a 300 px wide image, and then allow the retina plugin to substitute the @2x version, rather than serving everyone the hi-res image.
Doesn’t that seem more efficient?
I don’t think Google wants us to have awful image quality on our sites. I think they just want images to be as small as they can be at their current quality and sized correctly for the display device.
For example, the theme is serving 700 pixel wide images on smartphones where the viewport is 320 css pixels, which Google doesn’t like.
The other thing they don’t like is having wasted bytes in an image. I am compressing all of my images at JPEG quality 90 in pixelmator. I then run them through JPEGOptim, jpegtran, and jpegrescan at a quality of 90 and the file size drops by about half. Then I upload them and Google tells me they can still be a few KB smaller… I don’t care about that so much as I care about serving the wrong dimension of thumbnails to visitors.
I wish the theme made different thumbnails for iPad landscape, iPad portrait, and mobile phone so that we wouldn’t be serving oversized images, which Google hates, take a look at the image below:
When I had the retina plugin enabled for mobiles, it was trying to serve a 1490×966 image on the mobile phone. I had to disable that plugin for mobiles, because newspaper is delivering an image larger than a standard 2x retina image for all mobile phones regardless of whether or not they have the pixels to display the entire image.
I guess I’ll focus on the other things I can do something about, but I wish this would be addressed in a theme update if it’s possible with the bootstrap framework…
I’ve got a few questions on Pagespeed that hopefully some of you can answer.
1 – I’m trying to figure out the best way to improve my server response time. It varies anywhere from 0.4 seconds to 0.8 seconds. I upgraded to a Liquidweb SSD VPS with 3 GB of RAM hoping that would take care of it, but it didn’t – it made it through a heavy day of 30,000+ pageviews, but I still can’t seem to get the response time down. I’ve disabled plugins, but to no avail.
2 – I’m running W3 Total Cache along with Tagdiv speedbooster, and I am still getting the render-blocking CSS and Javascript errors. I’m assuming I can edit the plugin file to get rid of these, correct?
3 – I have a pagespeed score of 61 on one of my posts and I believe it’s related to all of the calls to fetch Gravatars for comments. On a page with few comments, the pagespeed score increases. Here’s a screenshot:
Lots of comments (Pagespeed Link):
Few comments (Pagespeed Link):
I would think that the only difference here is all of the external calls to Gravatar. It seems like there has to be a better way to display 200 blank images rather than calling 200 separate URL’s to obtain the same image – Also, Google is complaining that they aren’t “compressed” enough…
Thanks for any help you can offer! I’m hoping to get up to at least upper 70’s or 80 on mobile. I have Adsense, Google Analytics, and Piwik Analytics going so I know that will prevent me from getting too high.
Got them all fixed! It was tricky since phpMyAdmin would not let me do a find and replace of finding the copyright symbol and replacing it with ©. Somewhere along the line, it converted my “©” back into it’s equivalent copyright sign. I’m assuming it did this since phpMyAdmin is web based…
To make a long story short, I simply clicked the SQL tab and took out the copyright symbol and replaced it with ©
Hopefully this will help someone in the future. Here’s the SQL command, just fill in the name of your database where indicated:
UPDATEdatabase_name.wp_postsSETpost_excerpt= REPLACE(post_excerpt, '©', '©') WHEREpost_excerptLIKE '%©%' COLLATE utf8mb4_bin
