Help with optimizing a photo website (speed)

Hi group, I hope someone can assist me, I’m using a davidmichael theme with nickcates photo stacks. I have a wedding - photo booth site so the site is photo heavy, I have the photos set at 1400px longest side at 72dpi, I thought that would speed up the site but it’s a bit sluggish. I understand some of that is attributable to my host and traffic, but wondering in general if anyone has any tips on optimizing. I also have the site set to normal thumb quality.

Link please

http://photosrfun.com

The main banner image is 4MB. You definitely need to get that below 300kb at least. The rest of the images on the homepage seem to be a decent size. But that main image is what is killing performance.

Thanks JOE, I didn’t think it was that big but since I wrote the post, I went back and changed the thumbs to low res (forgot what tha’ts called) and the speed was better.

Thank you for the help!!! I’ll definitely buy some of your stacks soon.

Your page is not published right…you should republish all files.

Lol, I am doing that as we speak that’s why it’s not loading

Cool Just wanted you to know.

Sorry Joe #1 I appreciate your help!!! I’m surprised by selecting low res how much difference it made!

You still have a couple of really large images in there. That page could still be a lot faster. It has improved though…

Your Elvis image(banner-3.jpg) is 800KB at 1100x621.
I ran this through Photoshop Elements 11 (an oldie but a goldie):
I got it down to 175KB with the same dimensions at 50% quality.
I use 50% as a benchmark because I can’t see the difference in quality at this setting.
I brought up both images side by side on my 27" Thunderbolt screen and they looked identical.

You face image (portraits.jpg) is a whopping 1,9MB at 1700 x 1141.
With PE11 I reduced it to 437KB at the same size with 50% quality (i.e. no discernible loss in quality).
This is still too big in my opinion so I dropped it to 40% and got 330KB.
At 40% if you look really closely you can just see blurring but it’s acceptable.
I would have dropped the image size to 1600 x 1074 which at 40% gives 278KB (now we’re talking).

There are plenty of image optimisers out there including one made by the RapidWeaver team.
However if you are serious about photography you should invest in something more than a drag and drop solution.
PE11 is now 6 years old and incredibly still runs under Mohave. I have found nothing since to beat it at image optimisation but you’ll struggle to find a copy nowadays.

Use the app Squash from Ralmac shaves a good bit off the image files.

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