Between 7 and 27 Percent Off a Page's Image Weight, With Nothing to Switch On
Every image on every page of all 97 designs passes through a single place that decides how hard it is compressed. That setting moved one step down.
Measured properly, because the difference is small
Not through an automated grader. Runs on these pages vary too much to trust for a difference this size, and a number that moves on its own is not evidence.
Fourteen real images per site, fetched at both settings and weighed:
- 1,887 KB down to 1,370 KB. 27% off.
- 3,212 KB down to 2,660 KB. 17% off.
- 1,437 KB down to 1,330 KB. 7% off.
Hundreds of kilobytes on the image-heavy designs, which turn out to carry far more weight than the site most of this work had been measured against.
The quality question, which is the only one that matters
Compression that saves 27% and visibly degrades a headshot is not a saving, it is damage with a number attached.
So it was reviewed on film posters first, side by side at the size they actually render and again at three times that. Approved. Then headshots were checked separately and deliberately, because they are the main content of an actor's site and skin tones are much less forgiving than a detailed poster. The saving was the same 23 to 26% and the behavior matched, so the poster review carries.
That is a judgment call, made once, by looking at two people's sites. If you look at your own and think a photograph is worse than it was, that is worth telling us, and it is a more useful report than any measurement.
What was deliberately not done
The obvious pairing is a newer image format, which would save more again. It is not switched on, for a specific reason.
Serving it needs every image wrapped in an extra element, and that would break 129 style rules across 21 designs that address an image as a direct child of its container. One design alone has 85 of them. So the format would arrive, and the layout would fall apart on a fifth of the catalog.
It stays where the markup is written by hand and known to be safe, which includes the credit posters. Those are also capped at a sensible width now rather than being served at whatever size they happened to be filed at, which is covered in credit posters on our own servers.
Reverting is one line
Worth saying, because a platform-wide change to how every photograph looks should be trivially undoable. It is one line in each of two places, backwards.
Related: modern image formats, the delivery network, resizing on upload and design images moved across.
On what to upload in the first place, the headshot guide. Create a free actor website.
