High resolution (retina) images vs load time
-
I have an ecommerce website and have a product slider with 3 images.
Currently, I serve them at the native size when viewed on a desktop browser (374x374).
I would like to serve them using retina image quality (748px).
However how will this affect my ranking due to load time?
Does Google take into account image load times even though these are done asynchronously? Also as its a slider, its only the first image which needs to load. Do the other images contribute at all to the page load time?
-
"Large pictures tend to be bad for user experience."
I disagree. I think what you mean is slower loading is bad for the user experience. Higher quality pictures are better for the user experience.
I've been looking into deferring loading of the additional slider images. That should definitely improve load time as all the bandwidth can be used to download the first slider image.
Also the first slider image if you use a progressive format should show something quickly and then improve over time.
-
You also have to keep in mind that users will access your site from mobile devices and that the larger the page the longer it takes to load fully. You may lose some people during the time it takes to load the page. My website used to have a slider with three images. i removed the slider and replaced it with one static image. Large pictures tend to be bad for user experience.
-
Hey Dwayne
They are big images but from experience I have never seen a meaningful impact from these kind of changes (in around 15 years). Maybe work on optimising the images themselves as best as possible to bring the overall size down as much as possible. Sure, if your site is a slow loading nightmare and this is just the final straw then it may be an issue but by the sounds of it you are already taking that into consideration and your site is well hosted and performs better than most of everything else out there.
But, as ever in this game, my advice would be to be aware of possible implications, weigh up the pros and cons and then test extensively. If you see an impact in your loading time and search results (and more importantly in user interaction, bounce etc) after changing this one factor then you know you can roll it back.
Hope that helps
Marcus
-
Hi,
Its not that small a change...the size of each image will quadruple from around 10kb to 40kb. As there are three images thats 90kb more data. Which is around 20% of the total page size.
That's interesting what you mention about the first byte load time. I would have thought that was overly simple and would definitely have assumed Google would actually be more concerned with how long it takes for the page "to load" (e.g. using their pagespeed metrics).
I've optimized my site extensively and have pagespeed score of 95% and I use the amazon AWS servers.
I agree with your idea about doing what's right for my users. But if Google includes the image load time then my site will rank poorly and then I won't have any users!
In summary, I think what this question really comes down to is how does Google calculate page load times and does this include image load time and does it include load time for all images (even ones which aren't being rendered in the slider).
Thanks,
Dwayne
-
Hey
I think this is such a small issue overall that you should not worry about a slight increase in image sizes damaging your SEO (assuming everything else is in place).
I would ask myself the questions:
- Is this better for my site users?
- does the seriously impact load times (and therefore usability / user experience)?
If you believe it creates a better experience and does not impact loading times in a meaningful way then go for it and don't worry about a likely negligible impact on loading times.
A few things I would do:
- test average loading times with a tool like pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
- replace your images and test again
- look at other areas where you can speed up loading times
- make sure your hosting does not suck
For reference there was a post here a while back re the whole loading times / SEO angle that determined it was time to first byte (response time) rather than total loading time that had the impact - this would make total loading time academic from a pure SEO perspective but... it's really not about SEO, it's about your site users and whether this makes things better (improved images) or worse (slow loading) for them.
Seriously - don't worry about this small change too much from an SEO perspective. Use it as an excuse to improve loading time as that is a good exercise for lots of reasons but go with what is right for your users.
Hope that helps
MarcusRef
http://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-rankinghttp://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Image Sitemap for non indexed Products
Hi, we have several ecommerce sites. We want to do an image sitemap, as we have lots of attractive images. The question is, can you put images for non-indexed products there as well, or does that conflict with the normal sitemap (the images would be indexed, the products not)? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
508 compliance vs good SEO re: Image alt tags
I'm currently in debate with our 508 compliance team over the use of alt tags on images. For SEO, it is best practice to use alt tags so that readers can tell what the image represents. However, they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. I feel they are taking the "decorative" image concept in 508 compliance too far. It's intention is for images for bullets, etc that truly are decorative in nature and add no benefit to the reader. What is the communities thoughts on this? Have you ever run into scenario where 508 is attempting to ruin SEO? Usually the 2 play nicely.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpfleiderer0 -
Description vs meta description
I have an e-commerce website and am trying to create product category pages. I am under the impression that Description is the text that would appear under the title on a google search and I believe the meta description is just what google reads? Is having BOTH important or just description? Is it ok to duplicate the description for the meta description? I know its not good to duplicate descriptions on other products and pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchachula0 -
Why is this competitor ranking so high?
I have a competitor who consistently rans #1 or close in SERPS for keyword phrase "uncontested divorce lawyerser. in analyzing his site he doesn't seem to have anywhere near the links, domain authority or page authority that would justify this preeminence Is this a black hat situation or what? His site is www.uncontesteddivorceny.comhx thx Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
SEO: Subdomain vs folders
Hello, here's our situation:We have an ecommerce website, say www.example.com. For support, we use zendesk which offers a great platform that makes publishing FAQ and various resource articles very easy. We're torn between publishing these articles on our actual website, or publishing them via Zendesk. If we publish them on our website, the url would be something like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
www.example.com/articles/title_article.html On the other hand, if we publish them via zendesk, the url would look like:
support.example.com/articles/title_of_article We would like to publish them via Zendesk, however, we do no want to miss out on any SEO benefit, however marginal it may be. Doing it this way, the domain would have all of the ecommerce pages (product and category pages), and the subdomain would have ALL other types of pages (help articles and also policies, such as return policies, shipping info, etc etc). I know a long time ago, folders were preferred over subdomains for SEO, but things change all the time.Do you think setting up all the ecommerce pages on the domain, and all content pages on the subdomain, would be a lesser solution? Thanks.0 -
Image optimization in 2013
hello post the google Image update ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/01/faster-image-search.html ) please could you let me know what the status of image optimization is and also what the best practices are? Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
High Bounce Rate
I found something interesting in Google analytic 2 days ago i started getting visitors from a referral source called yndir.com if I click on it , it say the referral path is /adserver/showinterstitial.php there have been 300+ visitors in last 2 days and before that nothing. the site is pushing my bounce rate up. 3 days ago bounce rate was at around 50%, because of this site the bounce rate went up to over 75% already in 2 days... is this some sort of attack , i don't understand? when i go to yndir.com it says its yahoo directory? weird
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0