Around 500 Design Images Have Moved to the Delivery Network
Your photographs have been served from a global delivery network for a while, which we wrote about in image hosting moves to a global CDN. The images built into the designs themselves had not moved. Now 47 of them have.
The images you never think about
Every design ships with artwork of its own: background textures, section dividers, icons, patterns, the decorative pieces that make one design look different from another. They are not yours and you never upload them, so they are easy to forget.
They were also being served straight off our own disks, at whatever size and weight the theme's original author happened to export them at. On a design with a full-width background image, that single file could be heavier than every photograph on the page put together.
What moved and what did not
Roughly 500 images were uploaded and every reference to them rewritten. Measured across the catalog:
- Designs failing the "images on a delivery network" check: 55 down to 14
- Designs with a single asset over half a megabyte: 54 down to 3
- Designs bundling their own font files: 14 down to 2
About 140 images stayed where they were, deliberately. Those are the ones where the filename is assembled while the page is running, so there is no fixed reference to rewrite and no safe way to be sure the new address is right. A working local copy beats a broken remote link, so they keep loading from disk. They are the slower path and they are also the smaller one.
Around 950 images that no design referenced at all were archived rather than deleted. The design folders on the server are now about a third smaller.
What you get
Pages that start drawing sooner, especially on the image-heavy designs and especially a long way from our servers. Nothing to switch on and nothing that looks different: the same artwork, arriving from somewhere closer to whoever is looking at it, in a smaller file.
Where this sits
This is the last piece of the image work. The others were galleries loading as you scroll, modern image formats, resizing on upload and the delivery network itself. Together with lighter stylesheets, that is most of what makes up the page speed numbers.
Speed is a ranking signal and, more importantly, the reason people stay. See SEO for actor websites and mobile optimization.
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