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1. espressoguy
   Member
   Posted 11 months ago #

   First of all - Josh thanks for this excellent Plugin.

   My question is about the ideal or typical file size to avoid slowing-down one's site too much. I've installed a front-page Meteor Slides slider in the header of my site. My understanding is that when the user initially navigates to the front page of my domain all images associated with the slider will have to be downloaded first ...even though just one shows up initially ...right?

   So what is a good recommended file size for each image? My slider is 940x200 pixels and I currently am running 4 different images on the header slider; with each one being about 65K bytes. Is this bigger than what others are using? What is typical or recommended for file sizes (and quantity) for sliders?

   I'd like to hear from Josh on this but if others have input (such as "I'm using 4 images with each being 100K and everyone seems to think the site is fast enough ...etc...etc") ...that would be okay too.

2. espressoguy
   Member
   Posted 11 months ago #

   I've been checking other sites (just sites with sliders; not necessarily sites using meteor slides) and I notice that there are some sites that have sliders with images totaling about 250K-300K and they are very fast.

   So I'm thinking that perhaps it's a combination of the speed of the Webhost account combined with the size of the files.

   Hasn't anyone else looked into this?

3. JLeuze
   Member
   Posted 11 months ago #

   No problem, thanks for trying my plugin!

   That's correct, it is loading all of the slide images right away, the additional slides are just hidden by CSS while everything is loading.

   It's hard to say what a good size is. I keep an eye on the overall page size using Firebug when I am working on sites and my own max size for any page is 1MB, but I try to keep pages under 500K if I can.

   So lets assume that you've got 200k of content, and other images and scripts on the page, that leaves like 300 or 400k for slides. If you have very large images with a lot of detail that might only be 2 or 3, but if they are smaller or plainer images you might be able to fit in 8.

   I would try to keep the slide images at 100k or less a piece if you are going to have 3 or 4 large slides, but under 50k if you need to use 5 or 6 slides.

   On my own sites, I only have three slides currently, smaller images with file sizes from 20 to 75k. That should be plenty fast, but I have setup many slideshows with 4 or 5 75 to 100k slides and had no problems with speed.

   There are a lot of factors to consider though, a very slow webhost or a ton of traffic could cause you to add more compression to the images, or if a large percentage of your traffic is on mobiles.

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