Image compression and page download time

    Does anyone find it necessary to reduce the pixel width and height and increase compression in order to achieve faster page load times?

    Am I becoming obsessive about SEO?

    I know that long page loading times can be a turn off for visitors and search engines take this into account. Clicking between panos in a tour results in 64 calls to the server. Loading a new pano appears to pull 3-4mb of jepgs.

    My images are a little over 16,000 x 8,000 pixels and the resulting folders of tour jpegs are roughly 45mb each. I've experimented with compression and subsampling which can get a tour folder down to around 31mb, but reducing the images to 9000 x 4500 pixels offers a huge reduction to just 12mb. I've gone down to 60% on compression.

    I'm assuming the majority of visitors (hoping I get some) will be on a smartphone, so are lower resolution images acceptable?

    What pixel dimensions do you guys use and what level of compression? Is it possible to have the first pano at lower res and the remainder at a higher res to help with initial page download time? Does it even matter?

    This is for a personnel hobby website, so whilst I would like to offer good image quality to visitors, I need to offer a compromise between image quality and speed of the website.

    Perhaps I'm wrong but theorically the pano will first appear on screen far before the 3 or 4mb were loaded, krpano is great for that, it first loads low def cube before continuing to load more precise images. Also when you create the tiles (with multires) in krpano tools it compresses the images to a good quality but optimized.

    For example if I put 100mo of images in full quality krpano tools will give me a lighter folder (far less than 100mo) which means for me that it is trully optimized, because with the tiles you finally have more images than original as you have multiple versions of the image (tiles depending on the zoom level when navigating).

    Klaus or other people will perhaps give precision but krpano is made for fast loading so I'm quite sure images are optimized.

    But to answer to the first question, I think it's not a good idea to reduce the size in pixels because krpano is designed to load fast, even on huge images.

    Thanks for your replies, guys.

    That sounds really positive. Less resizing and better quality.

    I think I may be a little paranoid about factors relating to SEO, because the traffic to my last website fell to such a low level that I decided to close it down.

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