Archive for the 'Website Design' Category
My Blog was a Slow Loader
So I looked into why my blog was slow to load the last few weeks or so. It turned out the header background graphic (fall leaves) was a 340KB PNG file and it was adding 300+ KB of extra data that was not needed. So I changed it to a JPG with a lot of compression and its now just 16KB. Granted I still have some big graphics in a few of my recent posts which still yields 1MB initial load. But other than going through a lot of extra steps in my image posting process, this is just life. At least it is down from 1.4 MB which is a 30% savings.
But I started to wonder why the Wordpress theme I am using (or perhaps its Wordpress’s default?) uses a PNG instead of a JPG? The only time I think to use PNG is when I need an image with transparency so that the background shows through. Sometimes I use GIF but more and more I use PNG as it has transparency and I believe PNG can show more colors.
But as far as I can see, this banner/background image has no need for transparency. And since PNG is a lossless compression, it yields fairly large file sizes compared to JPG. Am I missing something? Are there other considerations?
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