Large Background Image Load Speed

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Hello everyone!

First off, Im loving the new forums and studiopress section. I had a question, I have a large image background on the site below and the load time isn't fantastic. I can't imagine having anything else as the background other than an image. I don't like the solid colour look. Is there a code snippet or something I can alter to make the site load faster? Is it TOO slow in your opinion?

http://www.HeadCaseSound.com

Thanks so much!

[Bill Murray]

You can use tools such as Pingdom or Yslow to analyze your page weight and load times.  Yslow shows your total page weight to be about 7.2 Mb, which is huge.  500 Kb is a more suitable page weight for your home page.  Pingdom shows about 1.6 Mb, which is still far too big.

A lot of your page weight does come from your background, so that is a big part of your problem here.  There's no code snippet that can get around your desire to have a big picture as a background.  You can use a lower resolution image, compress it, use a smaller image, or find a smaller image that can be repeated.

The question of whether your site is "too slow" depends on the visitor's connection.  For me, with a fast connection, the site is slow, but not annoyingly so.  If I were on a mobile device not using WiFi, I would have clicked away long before the page finished loading.  Not everyone has a fast internet connection or access to it all of the time.  Slow load times will cost you visitors and $.

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Thanks so much! Very helpful, and a fantastic plugin to use from now on! Have a great day!

[Author]

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