recently I made a website for my photography. htttp://www.simotamas.com I am a newbie, so its not the best site but it works fine for me, I got only one problem, when a site is loaded on a device for the first time, the gallery loading time takes up to 1-2 seconds.
Could you guys please check if I mess up something with the code? Or should I made the pictures even smaller? Any way I could increase the loading performance.
I would be really thankful for any advice.
The fact your website doesn't wait for the image to load is considered a plus (look into asynchronous web page content loading for a good read) that said you should compress your images before uploading them.. tinypng.com is a nice tool for it... But if it's a photography website doing so would reduce picture quality... Try to play with Photoshop save settings to find your ideal compromise between quality and size with respect to "memory" size... Pictures are heavy.. high definition and resolution will obviously result in heavier files to download
Update: another thing you could do is actually display (smaller) thumbnail and only load the full picture on request. I.e: user clicks and image opens in new tab
It would help if you create smaller thumb versions of your images so the browser can initially load these ones for the overview and no need for scaling way to big images down while rendering the page. An image should always be downloaded in the dimension it's going to be presented.
Some points you can consider
Use thumbnails for preview (low resolution) , while clicking load actual image.
Load images of only visible part first then load the images in bottom. (May affect user experience)
if you have cpu power , use any libraries like cache tools or compression tools like https://nielse63.github.io/php-image-cache/ . benchmark it carefully.
use gzip if you are not using gzip compression for your server.
