Optimizing GIFs for the Web

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Robin Rendle on

Ire Aderinokun describes a frustrating problem that we’ve probably all noticed at one point or another:

Recently, I’ve found that some of my articles that are GIF-heavy tend to get incredibly slow. The reason for this is that each frame in a GIF is stored as a GIF image, which uses a lossless compression algorithm. This means that, during compression, no information is lost in the image at all, which of course results in a larger file size.

To solve the performance problem of GIFs on the web, there are a couple of things we can do.

Switching to the <video> element seems to have the biggest impact on file size but there are other optimization tools if you have to stick with the GIF format.

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