How can I speed up a website with a large image gallery?

Hmm, it's not actually too slow I'd say. My internet is on the lower end of the quality spectrum (3Mbps DL), and it went alright.

If you really wanted to speed things up, I'd suggest showing less images, maybe adding a "load more" option, so if a user wishes to see more works, the images could be loaded then. Compression may have to be an option in the end.

This blog post has some good ideas of how to get rid load times related to images.

Edit: PS, there's a small white bar at the very bottom of that website (on the latest Chrome at least). Not sure if that was intentional.

Hi Josh,

Some of those images are really large. Your total page size is around 12.4MB.

As far as I can tell you're displaying the thumbnails at 175x175 and showing them in the lightbox at 300x300. If that is the largest you're displaying the image on the site then you need to optimize your images. You have some images that are around 1MB in size and a couple of thousand pixels in both dimensions.

Also, the native size of your images aren't square but you're showing them square on the site which means they're being scaled disproportionately.

I would recommend that you either crop the images square or let them be rectangular in the lightbox maintaining their native proportion.

You want to scale them down as well to the largest you will display them on the site. This keeps the file size down.

With 15 thumbnails on the page I think a good goal for total page size should be under 1MB.

Thanks guys! I'll try that and see how it goes.