"Large pictures tend to be bad for user experience."

I disagree. I think what you mean is slower loading is bad for the user experience. Higher quality pictures are better for the user experience.

I've been looking into deferring loading of the additional slider images. That should definitely improve load time as all the bandwidth can be used to download the first slider image.

Also the first slider image if you use a progressive format should show something quickly and then improve over time.

Hi,

Its not that small a change...the size of each image will quadruple from around 10kb to 40kb. As there are three images thats 90kb more data. Which is around 20% of the total page size.

That's interesting what you mention about the first byte load time. I would have thought that was overly simple and would definitely have assumed Google would actually be more concerned with how long it takes for the page "to load" (e.g. using their pagespeed metrics).

I've optimized my site extensively and have pagespeed score of 95% and I use the amazon AWS servers.

I agree with your idea about doing what's right for my users. But if Google includes the image load time then my site will rank poorly and then I won't have any users!

In summary, I think what this question really comes down to is how does Google calculate page load times and does this include image load time and does it include load time for all images (even ones which aren't being rendered in the slider).

Thanks,

Dwayne

I have an ecommerce website and have a product slider with 3 images.

Currently, I serve them at the native size when viewed on a desktop browser (374x374).

I would like to serve them using retina image quality (748px).

However how will this affect my ranking due to load time?

Does Google take into account image load times even though these are done asynchronously? Also as its a slider, its only the first image which needs to load. Do the other images contribute at all to the page load time?