Slow personal websites

[urgellx]

Hello, i've just wondered why website size prevention isn't more effective on the new "old web" web
overlords of neocities and others.
   I'm suffering with my Tor proxy while visiting sites that uphold the values of the old while
still being a giant monster full of larges images that could be compressed or resized very easily. I
like being a little bit more anonymous while browsing the web and i can wait for pages to load (for
normal websites) but with the personal websites that are not optimized at all, it's like i'm a slug.

Maybe websites made by web overlords that don't have fiber internet don't have this problem, but
i've seen it happen quite a lot since i've started browsing to get my fix of new-old goodness.
   Other than Internet in big cities being fast, i don't have any explanation for that problem
and that would mean that some websites aren't really made to be viewed by someone other than the
creator. (Which is true for some, but why would you make a gallery with links to your social medias
if you don't expect anyone to stumble upon your website ?)

Have a good day !

[virtualtelegrams]

I've noticed this too somewhat, with personal websites on Neocities or self hosted having HUGE file sizes for images and other media. I'm not sure exactly why people use such large media- maybe it stays cached in their browser when they're updating it so they don't notice how long it sometimes takes to load. Also, occasionally Neocities will have issues loading things. I've noticed I'll sometimes have to full reload (ctrl + f5) both the editor page and the result page to see even plaintext updates.
I use a pretty fast Ethernet connection on my computer, and still have these issues sometimes even if not as extreme. For larger sites such as the Internet Archive, loading times are on their end. But for smaller/self hosted Neocities-esque sites I'd guess that would be due to just the sheer size of images and media. Hell, even the Cobra Starship band website uses highly unoptimised media (The background is a non-tiling 1920x1080 GIF image, and there are other large graphics as well. Loads in line by line for me.)

[shevek]

I am definitely guilty of this on my main page I think, I will optimize it soon

Makes sense that people do not see it when it is cached or they have fast internet. But also, I think many are used to how images are stored and loaded on social media sites or Discord, where they are compressed "secretly" and hosted with high quality while being fairly small (like with webp). Because this compression during upload is not really shown anymore and people basically never hit any max file size anymore when posting, they assume the images are fine as they are, since they are small or do not need to load long everywhere else, too. They might not know every other service compresses the images for them to work as they do, and don't know they have to do the same.

[starbreaker]

I think that part of the problem is that a lot of web designers/developers either never knew how slow dialup could be, or have forgotten what it was like.

[fatgrrlz]

Man, I know this experience all too well… one word: Hughesnet  so glad I don’t live in the middle of nowhere anymore.

That aside: I’ve seen more than a handful of Neocities and other personal sites, mainly by other artists, that are horribly unoptimized and take forever to load. On mobile so I’m afraid of fatfingering but I agree wholeheartedly with shevek - it’s simply an issue of artists (and other neocities et al. netizens) not being aware that their images they upload to Neocities aren’t compressed. It’s the actual filesizes in the flesh!

Take a 4000x4000 piece of art that’s on their website that appears as a little 400x400 <img> takes so long to load because the actual sized file is being downloaded… and take that, times how many pieces of artwork they’ve got on their portfolio website, and needless to say your site’s slower than molasses.

I think there definitely needs to be some awareness spread concerning file sizes and how large files need to be handled on websites to ensure a seamless experience, regardless of network speeds. Stuff like smaller images and lazy loading can help immensely with load times.

[starbreaker]

Unfortunately, when you're an artist or photographer and you have a lot of images, it can be a pain to generate thumbnails for all of them if you've got to do it manually through an application like Photoshop. Though Photoshop does have macro recording and batch processing.

For my part, I've been meaning to write a little script that tests images to see if their dimensions exceed a certain threshold before generating WEBP versions. If they're too tall or wide, the WEBP versions will get shrunk to further reduce image size. Then again, since I'm using ImageMagick I might not need a shell script at all.

[Memory]

They might not know every other service compresses the images for them to work as they do, and don't know they have to do the same.

This is exactly my issue! I had no idea that this was an issue until this thread, though now that I know of it, I'll look into fixing it! A lot of my personal website faux pas issues are because I simply don't know. I read about a lot of them here, so I'm thankful to learn how to better my site experience through these threads!

[starbreaker]

This is exactly my issue! I had no idea that this was an issue until this thread, though now that I know of it, I'll look into fixing it! A lot of my personal website faux pas issues are because I simply don't know. I read about a lot of them here, so I'm thankful to learn how to better my site experience through these threads!

Nothing wrong with having to learn new things. We were all newbies once.

[Memory]

Nothing wrong with having to learn new things. We were all newbies once.

I couldn't agree more :D And this forum has been such a good place to learn about things I never even knew were issues and/or possible before!

[brisray]

Nothing wrong with having to learn new things. We were all newbies once.

Absolutely, just about the only thing people can do without learning it, is breathing.

Image optimization probably is the best improvement that can be easily done but 14 Website Speed Optimization Tips is a nice list of other speed tips. Not everything can be implemented by everyone, but it's a starting point.

You can always test individual pages to see how they are performing by using one or more of:

Catchpoint Web Page Test
GTMetrix
Solarwinds Pingdom
Whats My Ip's HTTP Compression Test
Yellow Lab Tools
Google PageSpeed

Minify can compress both CSS and JS files, but unless the files are big to begin with, there won't be much of an improvement.

[Memory]

@urgellx: It's like with CPU power. With a ton of free space, programs sadly can afford to be inefficent. Your TOR setup is an exotic one, which can't reach today's internet speed. I found the performance on TOR being quite inconsistent. In that case, every Kilobyte counts.

My test for site performance is using a GSM / EDGE mobile connection. GSM, the slow mobile network far below 1 Mbit/sec, the only available choice in some rural areas. In some parts of the world, GSM has been fully superseeded by the newer mobile standards already.

Going down to 256 colours on images is one step to reduce the file size. Going even further down to 8 colours leaves the image with between 1/3 and 1/4 of the size of the 256 colour version. Great potential, isn't it? Depends on the image of course.

Big files for downloads are no problems for the user experience. If you know that a big download is behind a link that takes a couple of minutes, you can leave the browser alone downloading (or browse through files already in the cache).

Would be nice to see slow connections being respected more. Because every, really every site could be improved in that regard.

[brisray]

As an old(er) person I well remember this sound -

- and because of the connection speed it was probably even more important to optimize everything on a webpage to get the size down than today.

I don't completely disagree with @Gans but reducing the number of image colors is only one way of optimizing them. I think the choice of format and compression level is probably even more important. Some people don't like the newer image formats such as Webp and SVG but the file sizes can be tiny for the same quality as the older formats.

Almost 20 years ago I got interested in the whole subject of how far an image file size could be reduced before they started loking horrible - https://brisray.com/web/cwimages1.htm. Maybe time for a rewrite?

[starbreaker]

I remember that sound too. And I've still got my old modem, a US Robotics model 5610 internal (PCI) faxmodem. I used to hang out on Linux and FreeBSD mailing lists helping people with their dialup configs. I suspect that if I had to, I could probably still bash out a wvdial config without too much time spent reviewing the manual.

[brisray]

A whole separate discussion but back then hardware came with a thick manual listing all the commands they could accept but the supplied software sometimes only came with a subset of those.

I used to have an Epson LQ 24-pin dot matrix printer I wrote my own controller for. Very ugly and clunky but it worked and anything it was able to do I was able to get at.

[Memory]

@brisray: Would be interesting to see how the new image formats compare size-wise. The table on your site is quite informative. And it proofs, that lowering the JPG quality factor is indeed a very effective option to reduce file size. Maybe you can expand the data table with some newer formats?