Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
.com vs .co.uk
Hi, we are a UK based company and we have a lot of links from .com websites. Does the fact that they are .com or .co.uk affect the quality of the links for a UK website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Structured data: Product vs auto rental schema?
Hi mozzers, If you are rental company, is it useful to add both the product and auto rental schemas or auto rental schema on its own should just be enough? Finally, on the auto rental schema, you have to add an address. Could we just add a city instead of an entire address and avoid receiving a warning message on the strutured data testing tool? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Text over image
Hello, I am creating an overlay on a image. Is it ok to write on this overlay in html or it is better to have the text not on a image for google and other search engines ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Using the same image across the site?
Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Lazy Loading of products on an E-Commerce Website - Options Needed
Hi Moz Fans. We are in the process of re-designing our product pages and we need to improve the page load speed. Our developers have suggested that we load the associated products on the page using Lazy Loading, While I understand this will certainly have a positive impact on the page load speed I am concerned on the SEO impact. We can have upwards of 50 associated products on a page so need a solution. So far I have found the following solution online which uses Lazy Loading and Escaped Fragments - The concern here is from serving an alternate version to search engines. The solution was developed by Google not only for lazy loading, but for indexing AJAX contents in general.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO
Here's the official page: Making AJAX Applications Crawlable. The documentation is simple and clear, but in a few words the solution is to use slightly modified URL fragments.
A fragment is the last part of the URL, prefixed by #. Fragments are not propagated to the server, they are used only on the client side to tell the browser to show something, usually to move to a in-page bookmark.
If instead of using # as the prefix, you use #!, this instructs Google to ask the server for a special version of your page using an ugly URL. When the server receives this ugly request, it's your responsibility to send back a static version of the page that renders an HTML snapshot (the not indexed image in our case). It seems complicated but it is not, let's use our gallery as an example. Every gallery thumbnail has to have an hyperlink like: http://www.idea-r.it/...#!blogimage=<image-number></image-number> When the crawler will find this markup will change it to
http://www.idea-r.it/...?_escaped_fragment_=blogimage=<image-number></image-number> Let's take a look at what you have to answer on the server side to provide a valid HTML snapshot.
My implementation uses ASP.NET, but any server technology will be good. var fragment = Request.QueryString[``"_escaped_fragment_"``];``if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(fragment))``{``var escapedParams = fragment.Split(``new``[] { ``'=' });``if (escapedParams.Length == 2)``{``var imageToDisplay = escapedParams[1];``// Render the page with the gallery showing ``// the requested image (statically!)``...``}``} What's rendered is an HTML snapshot, that is a static version of the gallery already positioned on the requested image (server side).
To make it perfect we have to give the user a chance to bookmark the current gallery image.
90% comes for free, we have only to parse the fragment on the client side and show the requested image if (window.location.hash)``{``// NOTE: remove initial #``var fragmentParams = window.location.hash.substring(1).split(``'='``);``var imageToDisplay = fragmentParams[1]``// Render the page with the gallery showing the requested image (dynamically!)``...``} The other option would be to look at a recommendation engine to show a small selection of related products instead. This would cut the total number of related products down. The concern with this one is we are removing a massive chunk of content from he existing pages, Some is not the most relevant but its content. Any advice and discussion welcome 🙂0 -
Redirecting to a new domain... a second time
Hi all, I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this: Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we... Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to... third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL. My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right? The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3) Thanks for any insights on this! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC1 -
External 404 vs Internal 404
Which one is bad? External - when someone adds an incorrect link to your site, maybe does a typo when linking to an inner page. This page never existed on your site, google shows this as a 404 in Webmaster tools. Internal - a page existed, google indexed it, and you deleted it and didnt add a 301. Internal ones are in the webmaster's control, and i can understand if google gets upset if it sees a 404 for a URL that existed before, however surely "externally created" 404 shoudnt cause any harm cause that page never existed. And someone has inserted an incorrect link to your site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0