File Sizes: Making the Most of that One Free Neocities Gigabyte

[Corrupted Unicorn]

So... I fell sick again  and since I'm going to spend a lot of time on the computer    , I decided this would be a good time to reduce the total file size of my site.

Smaller sile fizes have many advantages: faster loading times for you and your visitors, being able to squeeze in a few more images, that lovely old school charm gently crushed images have. 

In this topic, I'm going to detail my file resizing journey as to open up the discussion, get feedback on what could I do better and just share nice tips and advice about file weight Does anybody on old forums remember the culture surrounding "heavy" signatures? 

I've been doing most of my downsizing by hand:

1- Get a working copy of my site on my PC via the Neocities Site Downloader
2- Painstakingly peruse every single image file (text files aren't too big so I don't worry about those)
3- My scale to determine whether a file size is good enough or not is something I read from Melooon in his zine: keep images under 600kb
4- If an image is bigger than that, I try to resize it with different methods:

• If it's a static image, I try to reduce its weight and/or size via Squoosh. Most of these images don't need to be PNGs. Overall JPGs are lighter than PNGs. 
• If it's an image with transparency, I can try to do things with Squoosh, but it can only do so much. Most of the time it's more convenient for me to grab that PNG and scale it down with Photoshop myself.
• If it's a GIF, I can try the GIF Optimizer by EZGif.

I think I've been able to successfully downscale everything that was larger than 600KB except my Masked Singer GIFs  In my defense they are quite lenghty and complex GIFs - actually video-captures from the show. I tried to squash and compress as much as I could, but... I guess there's so much I can do 

The one thing I purposefully left out of my file optimizing so far has been my drawings from the Art Gallery. I'm unsure on how to tackle this... I don't quite know how to balance file optimization and showcasing my own art in detail yet.

So yeah, tell me, how are your website's files optimized? Don't be like me, start as early as you can"     

[solbeth]

i am so glad you are talking about this because i feel like file optimization will be a big problem for me in the future, as i plan to include a lot of images on my website. although i *am* a neocities supporter, so luckily i do have a bunch more to work with. before i was though, i hosted my files on an external, non-neocities server (i use catbox.moe, though i plan to move most of base site elements to neocities hosting now).

i will definitely be getting a sure out of squoosh from now on! also, you really called me out with the 'not everything needs to be a png' bit, amd definitely guilty of that.

[KiwiMeowo]

Whenever I want to post art on my website, I often go to a image compressor/resize website to reduce its file size. Also, to save the Neocities storage size, I upload most of my images on Dropbox, then embed them into my website.

You reminded me I should convert my jpgs to pngs, that's something I often forget!

[Bede]

For my own personal art, which I like to keep at the highest quality possible, I like to use tinypng. It compresses your images down as much as possible without visible quality loss, which is what differentiates it from Squoosh, as mentioned in the original post. I use Squoosh for just about everything else I want on my site.

I use postimages.org to host my pixel hoard. Though, I've recently switched to filegarden.com for hosting my misc images for forums and such, and I like it better, so I recommend it over postimages. You need an account for filegarden, but its UI is way better, and can host more file types, like audio files.