Reply To: Difference between preloading images and lazy loading images

[Shikkediel]

The pages I made usually wait for the window.onload event to show most of the content so this implies waiting for all resources (JS included) to have downloaded. The overall file size is limited though so not lazy loading anything only has a limited impact. I haven’t gone to the point yet where only the section of the page one actually lands on gets it’s images loaded first. This would of course be an improvement but I’d prefer to never get a “flash of unstyled content”. Still a work in progress on many fronts.

http://ataredo.com/

A few approaches are in place to generally speed up things there. Like checking for cached images (then the spinner is not shown – try and refresh it), compressing them, saving scripts in localStorage and loading them asynchronously (instead of one after the other) to begin with. Google PageSpeed “complains” about the multiple initial requests though (about which I do not care much).

Score is quite fine because of the async thing

In short – it’s probably mostly a personal preference, coming back on your example…

And there’s a lot of tweaks to speed up a page (perceivably), the images are only one factor.

By the way, I think research has shown that visitors hardly ever flick through a slidehow at all.