Thread Starter
hwyman
(@hwyman)
There does seem to be some significant latency issues possibly because of the number of images. In my limited testing the entire site comes up fairly quick but no images are displayed for 30 seconds or more (initially). I’m not using any caching yet (considering W3 Total Cache) but would that help? Also, I’ve read that there may be some compatibility problems with W3 Total Cache, wp 3.4.2 and/or Meteor. Besides eliminating most of the 175 images, do you have any other suggestions? I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.
Hi Vic, technically you can add as many slides as you want, there is no limit. But you are limited by the resources of your server, the bandwidth of your visitors, and how long they want to spend on the page viewing the slides.
Meteor Slides will work with caching plugins, you just might need to disable script minifying or exclude Meteor Slides from this. Caching is a good idea but it won’t help you with all those images, the pages you serve will be static, no database calls, but it still has to load 175 image files.
How many slides you can realistically load in a slideshow depends on the file size of the slide images. I try to keep the download size of every web page under 1MB, ideally under 500KB. You can use a web inspector to see just how big your pages are. If the slide images are very large, 300KB, you might only want to use 2 or 3 slides. But if they are very small, 25KB, you could get away with using 10 or so slides.
The default quantity is 5, this is a good number with a homepage slideshow that has larger 100KB+ images and visitors that aren’t going to spend more than 30 seconds on the homepage anyway. A lot of users will have up to 10, or even 20 slides, but anything beyond that is pushing it.
Thread Starter
hwyman
(@hwyman)
That’s interesting. I’m way over those limits! Although these images aren’t huge (940×188), they’re around 600KB each so I have 103MB just in images and these are header images on every page. I’ll try to see if I can reduce the size of the images, then try again using your guidelines. I appreciate your help and I’m glad I asked you about this! Thank you!!!
No problem, what type of images are they? You should be able to get 940×188 images down to 100k as like an 80% quality JPG in Photoshop using save for web. But even at 100k you wouldn’t want more than 8-10 images!
Thread Starter
hwyman
(@hwyman)
I ran them all through an optimizer and got them down to between 20 and 25KB each which is a HUGE difference. Then I deleted all of the ones I uploaded previously and uploaded the optimized ones. The images are all black & white with my red & blue, transparent logo on them. They were PNG files but apparently when I uploaded them they were converted to JPG. I reset the slideshow quantity to 10 and put the first 10 into the slides. Everything’s working great and the images don’t look any different than the originals. I plan to put the rest of them into the slides but only have 10 with a published status at any time. The others will be pending review or draft. I’ll just have to change them out manually every so often. The site I’m working on is here http://www.kirkwoodhwy.com if you want to see. It’s a work in progress and eventually I have to copy it to its ultimate home (www.kirkwoodhighway.com).
Wow, that’s a big improvement! With the amount of slides you have, if you want to be able to easily switch them around I’d suggest publishing them all with a quantity of 10 so only the 10 latest slides are loading. Then you can use the Post Types Order plugin to add drag and drop sorting, so that you can easily change which slides are loaded.
