Making WordPress.org

Opened 10 years ago

Closed 10 years ago

#845 closed defect (bug) (fixed)

New Theme Repo: Horrible loading times for preview images

Reported by: usabilityidealist's profile usability.idealist Owned by: obenland's profile obenland
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Theme Directory Keywords: ui-feedback ux-feedback needs-patch
Cc:

Description

Reminds me of my first impression of a shop home page I had to optimize later on .. 4,8 MB of data to load .. time is ticking by ... and people jump off ... gone!

Same here - "just" 3,8 MB to load, but still. Althou TimThumb has been deprectated, nothing should stop you from using helpers like ImageMagick, the magickal GDLib, pngquant and the sorts.

"responsive" images aint an excuse either. None of these images seem to be over the "recommended" size, so it's still 3,8 MB on a mobile phone or a tablet .. depending on your connection, a horrible LONG time to wait for.

Using pngquant in a quick test - after having to convert one of those "png" files, because it was just a renamed JPG - with 128 colors default setting, I was able to reduce the size by more than the half (approx 60%), while still obtaining a few up to non-detectable changes compared with the original screenshot images.

Attachments (1)

845.diff (3.6 KB) - added by obenland 10 years ago.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (4)

@obenland
10 years ago

#1 follow-up: @obenland
10 years ago

  • Priority changed from high to normal

@dd32 commented on this on make/themes with:

Yes, currently we’re loading the same theme thumbnails as we do for the existing directory, the CDN setup we’re using for these screenshots doesn’t currently allow for much configuration. If theme authors were to compress their thumbnails more, it’d certainly help with Theme ZIP total size and the weight of these pages…
This does mean that the page load is rather heavy for slower connections, but is no worse than the pageload within WordPress itself, and only worse than the old directory in that this loads more than 10 items by default and allows a river, which can quickly increase the MB size of loaded images.

We could offload to Photon which would bring page weight down by ~60%, but it's not possible to update those screenshots as they are cached forever. Theme screenshots do change from time to time and we need to account for that.

#2 in reply to: ↑ 1 @usability.idealist
10 years ago

Replying to obenland:

Yes, currently we’re loading the same theme thumbnails as we do for the existing directory, the CDN setup we’re using for these screenshots doesn’t currently allow for much configuration. If theme authors were to compress their thumbnails more, it’d certainly help with Theme ZIP total size and the weight of these pages…

Maybe this could be turned into a recommondation for the Theme Guidelines? Eg. "try to compress the image better / use optimizers" plus a selection of links to helpful tutorials + (online) tools?

cu, w0lf.

#3 @obenland
10 years ago

  • Owner set to obenland
  • Resolution set to fixed
  • Status changed from new to closed

In 1238:

WP.org Themes: Use Photon for theme screenshots.

The Theme Directory feeds off of images to illustrate themes, so we will always
have a sizable footprint. In listings, screenshots are retina, so four times
the size they could be, on single they are over 700px wide. No reason not to
try our best to keep it managable though!

Using Photon will cut page weight to about half of what it is now.
We're adjusting the size to only what we need and remove all meta data.

See https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/meta/p1423518323000926

Fixes #845.

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