Google PageSpeed Insights

EverythingEverywhere

I recently ran my portfolio site through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool and the results were.....not impressive.

It scored a 59 on mobile and a 54 on the desktop. I tested several other sites of Smugmug users that I know and the results were similar. Anywhere from 62 to 27.

Much of the problem had to do with how javascript and CSS are handled, which is beyond anything individual Smugmug users can control.

Obviously, getting a 100 wouldn't be necessary, but it seems there might be some low hanging fruit that could be fixed to improve everyone's score. I'm guessing at least a few of these fixes could be done quickly and impact everyone's site.

leftquark

Those Google (and other company) tests can often be quite misleading, mostly because they're just purely testing speed and completely ignore user experience. A page with photos, inherantly, is going to score lower than generic webpages which are more text heavy.

In general, SmugMug sites load very fast. We do all sorts of optimizations so that the page loads fast and images appear instantly to you and your visitors when browsing photos. Our ops and engineer teams are constantly pushing improvements to make load times quicker and more performant. An example of this speed battle is one of the reasons why we continue to serve your photos through photos.smugmug.com instead of your custom domain (skipping the CDN would slow down load times and make the results on that test even worse).

Some things that can slow down those page load times include the fact that after the content of the page has loaded we start pre-loading the next/previous images so that when you or your users browse other photos, they load instantly. We could improve the test results by not loading those extra images, but then your users might see a lag when going to the next or previous photos. That's a bad experience that we'd like to avoid.

Another factor that I've seen the Google speed tests ding SmugMug for is image quality. They say things like "compress your images further to reduce load times." One of the reasons why SmugMug has stood out, and our customers constantly tell us is important to them, is that your photos look great on your SmugMug site. We've performed extensive testing to determine the level of compression we apply to the display photos so that the compression is unnoticeable. If we compressed photos to speed up the results, your photos would look worse. If we hear that you and our other customers would prefer faster load times at the expense of quality, we'd consider compressing photos further.

Also, in the past Googlebot couldn't handle websites with Javascript, which SmugMug is built on, and their bot was unable to render SM sites. We do some things to allow Googlebot to see how your sites render properly, but those speed tests never like that (they say things like "eliminate Javascript blocking scripts"). This has absolutely nothing to do with your load times and is just a generic message because they do some odd things. We are looking into whether Googlebot can now properly render our javascript and, if they can, would stop the extra controls we added and instead just serve them the regular SmugMug page.

Allen

I quite offer click to old galleries and it takes about 30 seconds for any photos to show. The page loads real fast and waits for ph0tos.
This happened quite often when going gallery to gallery. I timed it many times.

EverythingEverywhere

I'd like an option to compress images further.

I understand that for some customers, compression isn't much of an issue. If you are just showing a portfolio of wedding photos to a client, compression doesn't really matter.

I use Smugmug for image hosting on my website. In my case, increased image compression would come in handy, at least for some images. I have a lot of images stored on Smugmug, and not all of them have to be compressed, but many that I serve on my site could use extra compression.

leftquark

@EverythingEverywhere said:
I'd like an option to compress images further.

I understand that for some customers, compression isn't much of an issue. If you are just showing a portfolio of wedding photos to a client, compression doesn't really matter.

I use Smugmug for image hosting on my website. In my case, increased image compression would come in handy, at least for some images. I have a lot of images stored on Smugmug, and not all of them have to be compressed, but many that I serve on my site could use extra compression.

You could always compress them yourself before uploading them to SmugMug. If you're using the Lightroom Plugin to publish your photos it would be super easy to toggle the compression before you send them up.

EverythingEverywhere

I know.

I'd rather not have 2 versions of the same photo.

Just like I upload 1 file and display several different size images, I'd like to be able to upload 1 high-quality file but display a compressed or non-compressed version.

leftquark

@EverythingEverywhere said:
I'd rather not have 2 versions of the same photo.

Just like I upload 1 file and display several different size images, I'd like to be able to upload 1 high-quality file but display a compressed or non-compressed version.

Could you tell me a little more about how you’d want this to work? What would cause you to display the compressed vs. Uncompressed version? You’re using these to embed in your blog/website, right? Are there certain sizes you use frequently (for example many blogs are fixed-width constrained to <1600px). Do you want to account for the influx of retina displays that require higher resolution?

(Figured if we were to offer this solution, I’d want to get additional insight from all of you, so we might as well start gathering that insight now).

EverythingEverywhere

I'm envisioning something that could be triggered in the URL, just like images sizes. For example, if I have a URL for a photo that is of the form ...../XL/i-J25t4xw-XL.jpg it will serve up an image of a particular size. If I change the URL, the image size would change.

But, let's say I serve up an image like this ..../XLc/i-J25t4xw-XLc.jpg That would be the same image, at the same size, but it would be highly compressed. The vast majority of the images I have on Smugmug probably would not need a separate compressed version, especially if you consider each image having multiple sizes available. Perhaps the first time the compressed image is called it is created, and then it is just served up like a normal image.

I would only use this type of photo when I'm displaying an image on my website. The status quo is fine for most of my image catalog.

My stats show I have about 56,000 images uploaded to Smugmug. I have a fairly popular blog that has been around for over a decade. I estimate I'd have fewer than 1,000 images which I would use this sort of compression on.

Having a compressed option would improve page speed load times for me and reduce bandwidth for Smugmug. My stats show that I usually have over 1,000,000 image views per month on my account. I'm guessing the majority of those views are all coming from a small percentage of my photos.

....and while I'm at it.

Another nice addition would be the ability to rename photos. I know this has been a user request for a while, but there might be an easy solution. The biggest thing is being able to put keywords directly into the URL of an image. You could just have part of the URL which is ignored by Smugmug if there is something there. Just like how Gmail ignores periods in the email address.

Example:

Using the same URL as above, ...../XL/i-J25t4xw-XL.jpg could be the same thing as ...../XL/this-is-my-keyword/i-J25t4xw-XL.jpg

Everything in the keyword space could just be ignored by Smugmug and it would serve up the exact same photo as before. No major changes to the database. However, users would still be able to put keywords into an image URL.

Putting them together, a compressed, keyword stuff URL would be ..../XLc/this-is-my-keyword/i-J25t4xw-XLc.jpg