Images not loading after switch to SSL

I had a look at your site, and noticed a few issues:

1. Your images are very big: Some of the images I looked at were more than 10MB. When using images on the web, it’s best to keep your images as small as possible so they can be downloaded and seen by everyone. With images that large, the page is going to take a very long time to load for readers accessing your site from a mobile phone, for example. And if like me, some of them have a data cap on their monthly plan, you’ll eat through most if not all their plan just by loading this one gallery. To avoid these issues, it’s best to resize your images and compress them before to upload them on your site. Most image editors offer an option to export for the web that can be helpful. There, you’ll be able to compress your images without losing any image quality, which is important in your line of work ??
2. Since your images are so big, they can take a long time to load. Take this example: https://i.wpne.ws/ixZ6 It took me more than 30 seconds to load the image. Jetpack’s Photon service (or your readers) won’t wait that long for images to load. Photon will give up after 10 seconds, and render broken images instead. You’ll consequently want to keep your images small enough so they can be loaded in less than 10 seconds.
3. You’ve included more than 80 images in this gallery. That means that your readers and the Photon service have to download 80 images at once when loading the page. This may also explain why images may be slow to load, if you’re trying to load 80 at once. To avoid this issue, you can spread out your images onto separate pages.

I hope this helps!

Jeremy,

Choosing to use smaller images and less images per page is a good tip for better site performance in general. However, it doesn’t address the issue I posted about. Before the switch to SSL, 100% of the images on this site (including all those with large file sizes) were being served up my the wordpress.com CDN, whereas after the switch to SSL, many of the images hit a 404 and never load at all. That’s the problem I need a resolution to, and the Jetpack documentation doesn’t seem to address it. It just says the images are cached indefinitely with no mechanism provided to bust the cache and have the images uploaded again. I can’t be the only one who’s ever started using Photon/Tiled Galleries on a site, then switched it to SSL.

When you switch to SSL, the image URLs change from https://... to https://... and the previously cached images consequently don’t matter anymore: each one of the images on your site has to be downloaded and cached again by Photon. You’re essentially starting from scratch; each new URL is a new image for Photon.

Unfortunately, because your images can’t be downloaded in less than 10 seconds right now, they can’t be cached by Photon.

It is possible that before your switch to HTTPS the performance of your images was better; that would explain why it worked before. Unfortunately, since you’ve now switched to HTTPS Photon uses HTTPS when fetching images from your site.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Jeremy,

Thanks a lot for your help. I batch resized all the images on the site and they’re now being served up by the wordpress.com CDN without a problem. Much appreciated! ????