Final Tile Gallery Speed Performacne

Well, the issue is quite complex, first:

The plugin does not scale the image so the browser has to download a full-size image and scale it down

that’s not true actually. Final Tiles Gallery let you choose the desired image size but the algorithm has to scale down some images in order to make them fit in their container.

You can reduce the difference between real size and scaled size by setting the Image Size Factor (General section) to 1 but the downside is that some images could be rendered at a larger size therefore loosing quality.

You can check the documentation https://issuu.com/greentreelabs/docs/finaltilesgridgallery-documentation at page 7 it explains the algorithm.

Second, results of tools like GTmetrix and PageSpeed should be interpreted carefully. 99.9999999% of websites serve scaled images, and you can guess why. Responsive websites adapt their layout based on the browser’s width. With dozen of different screens, it would be impossible (or quite hard at least) to have pre-scaled images for all device sizes.

So what usually happens is websites use only the larger needed size. The downside is you’re not saving bandwith and loosing speed when images are served to devices with small screens.

Webmasters with good technical skills use image sets https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Responsive_images but if you want to use them in WordPress you should be able to develop your custom theme.

Honestly, I’d like to introduce responsive images in Final Tiles Gallery and I hope I’ll be able to do it this year, but even with responsive images, that won’t pass the GTMetrix tests.

What you should really care is compression. There are good tools like ShortPixel https://shortpixel.com/ that can be used from WordPress, otherwise you can use https://compressjpeg.com before uploading the images. Compressed images count much more.

Finally, to give you a complete answer, there are also tools like Jetpack’s Photon that resizes images on-the-fly based on the resolution, the same thing happens with PhotoBlocks https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/photoblocks-grid-gallery/ which has its own resizer so that the images are scaled at the exact needed size.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by Diego.