Just realized most digital art portfolios are way too slow to load

I was looking at a friend's new portfolio site last week and it took 12 seconds for the first image to show. He had all his work in 8K PNGs with no compression. This matters because people click away after 3 seconds if a site is slow. I know from my own site traffic that cutting image sizes in half doubled the time people spent looking at my art. How do you balance image quality with keeping your site fast?

3 comments

3 Comments

brian3032mo ago

Man that's such a common problem lol. Your friend's 8K PNGs are killing his load times for sure. I always run everything through a free compressor before uploading, it makes a huge difference. Most people viewing on a phone or laptop screen can't even tell the quality dropped a bit.

uma_nelson852mo ago

But what about people with good screens, @brian303?

webb.christopher1mo ago

Oh man, I'm picturing your friend's portfolio as like a digital museum where you wait in line for each painting to load. 8K PNGs? Might as well send people a zip file and tell them to come back next week. I lost it when brian303 mentioned the free compressor thing because seriously, my own site was a disaster until I realized most of my followers are looking at my stuff on their phones with like 2 bars of signal anyway. Nothing kills an artist's vibe faster than someone tapping away before your first piece even shows up.