Why Heavy Media Kills a Site, and What to Do About It
A portfolio site is inevitably heavy: photographs and video are the content. The question is not how to get rid of media but how to let a visitor see the page before their patience runs out.
The cost of delay
Patience is measured in seconds. Each additional second of waiting noticeably increases the share of people who close the tab. On mobile data the difference between 500 kilobytes and 5 megabytes is the difference between «it opened» and «it did not».
What delivers the main gain
- A poster instead of video at first paint. A 30-kilobyte picture instead of a 600-kilobyte clip assembles the page instantly
- Deferred loading. Video and images below the fold do not load until approached
- Size by actual display. Do not load a frame twice the size of the space it occupies
- Dimensions declared in markup. Otherwise the page jumps as things load
- No external fonts or libraries. Every external host is a separate connection
- Styles inside the page. For a small site this removes a request
- Staggered starts. Five clips starting at once obstruct one another
What is overrated
Minifying markup, squeezing whitespace and similar byte-level economy. Against megabytes of media this is a fraction of a per cent. Optimise what weighs something, and what weighs something is pictures and video.
How to check
Open the page with the developer panel on the network tab and enable throttling. Watch not the total time but the moment the screen became meaningful. That moment determines the impression.
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