What are some techniques to speed up a website that is very image heavy?

[noahgelman]

I’m working on a site with a lot of image assets and I’ve trying to find some good techniques to load everything smoothly. Any ideas?

I have image compression and gzip compression so far.

[Mottie]

Maybe use lazy loading so all of the images don’t load immediately.

[dfogge]

for PNG’s it might be a good idea to save them at 8bit. 8bit png’s only support up to 256colors so it may not be appropriate in all cases. also, see this SmashingMag post for a ton of other PNG optimization techniques.

after you export everything for web make sure you run all your images through here: http://www.smushit.com/

for reusable elements such as nav buttons (in all their various states), icons, etc. its a good idea to create sprites to keep the number of server calls down (very important for fast page loads).

you can accomplish this by hand but it’s kind’ve tricky. instead, i recommend using a tool like this: http://www.spritecow.com/

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