Advice on image heavy site, compression and slow page loads

I have a videogame fansite. By its nature it's image intensive.

No matter how I capture the images, process them, run them through compression plugins like Smush or standalone software, I cannot reduce them enough so they don't drag my page load times into the dirt. At least not without the images looking like crap.

I'm using Siteground web hosting platform.

I need advice on how to compress my images more without losing too much quality. If possible.

My most recent idea was seeing if images could be stored somewhere (other than my webhost servers) that might be faster. It turned out to be too complicated for my skill or comprehension level.

Any advice is welcome. Including directing me somewhere that could help more.

Topic compression images Wordpress

Category Web

1
answered at

I think that the best option, as you already pointed out, is to host your images elsewhere. We use an Amazon AWS S3 account and with the WP Offload Lite plugin the process is quite strightforward

1
answered at

There are many different ways to optimize images. I'd say, if you're not very technical, or just don't have the time or money to spend, I'd recommend trying Jetpack: https://jetpack.com/support/site-accelerator/

It will automatically host your images on their CDN, which is what you were wanting to do. It also serves webp images which are smaller than JPG or PNG.

WordPress 5.5 has also added the "lazy" attribute to image tags, which means only images visible in the viewport are loaded. https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/07/14/lazy-loading-images-in-5-5/

Another part of image optimisation is making sure you deliver the best image size to each devices (mobile/tablet/desktop). This can be achieved by tweaking the "sizes" and "srcset" attributes. Here's a good explanation for that https://cloudfour.com/thinks/responsive-images-the-simple-way/

Siteground also has image optimizing tools which I haven't looked at, however they might not be useful if you use the latest WordPress and Jetpack https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/sg-optimizer/image-optimizations/

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