Found out my "professional" art portfolio site loads slower than a dial-up meme

I ran my digital art portfolio through Google's PageSpeed tool last night and almost choked. The score was a 42 out of 100 on mobile. Turns out those high-res 6000x4000 PNGs I was uploading directly were each like 15 megabytes. I had no idea image file sizes could tank load times that bad. Found the stat on some web dev blog called DebugBear where they tested 10 art sites and the slow ones lost 50 percent of visitors. Anyone else here ever checked their site speed and gotten a nasty surprise with your own work?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_west11mo ago

Not to be that guy, but the PageSpeed score dropping that low is probably more about how those huge PNGs are served than just their file size. JPEG or WebP can get you 90 percent of the quality at a fraction of the megabytes. Also, that DebugBear stat sounds a bit fuzzy since losing visitors depends on more than just speed but you're right that slow load times definitely hurt engagement.

nora5351mo ago

My brother in law runs a small local bakery and he spent months obsessing over their website load times while their actual storefront had a cracked window and dirty tables. It's like people get so caught up in the technical numbers they forget the real world. I've seen the same thing with friends who stress over their phone's benchmark scores while their actual apps lag because they never close any tabs. Numbers give us something to fixate on but the real test is whether your site works for actual humans on actual devices. So yeah, format matters but the bigger picture is that nobody's going to stick around for a pretty image if the whole experience feels clunky.