Preload?

Hi Seph,

the gif player does not do any preload, the slowdown of your site must be caused by something else. Have a look in the chrome network panel to investigate the cause, there you can also so what is loaded when.

…though, if you have many gifs ob one page, all gif previews must load before you will be able to play the first gif.
When you load a page, a spinner shows on your first gif preview picture (instead of the gif-button), the initial spinner will show until all content of your page is loaded (I’m not sure about ads, though) once everything is loaded, the “gif” buttons appears and you are able to start (and load) the gifs.
We chose this solution for a better overall performance on mobile devices.

Ah, what is what the spinner does. I thought it does preload. Anyway, what is the best way to keep the preload images small?

Hmm…would where be a way to speed up the loading, besides optimizing the server? I noticed that even a 3MB gif takes like a minute to load, which is probably too slow for most used cases.

The preload pictures are automatically generated by the plugin, their size shouldn’t be an issue.
For the size of your gifs – not much one can do about it. Gifs are large.
With some optimization of your site you can significantly speed up the overall page load time, the instructions on how to accomplish that would be outside the support scope on wp gif player.

Would it be possible to autoplay on desktop but to show a play button for mobile like mic.com does it?

That would be a great feature.
We will put this in consideration for future updates.