Decreasing Page Load Time with Placeholder Images - Good Idea or Bad Idea?

[airnwater]

In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image.  When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page.

Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div.

From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question.  However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image.  How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?

[MagicDude4Eva]

Are those images for search results (i.e. product thumbnails) or actual product pages? A link would help to understand how your site currently looks.

If you have not done it yet, I would run you page through webpagetest.org (or pagespeed) and then look at obvious optimisations (CDN, HTTP cache directives, image-size optimisations) first.

It sounds to me that you are "caching" multiple products in JS and based on user interaction show then the relevant content. Depending on how this is done, you might actually not get any SEO value from this.

[benjaminspak]

If it's Good for users it's good for Google.

Potentially duplicate content < Fast page load speed + Lower Bounce Rate