Author: Charlie Furphy

It’s no real secret that the size of web pages is increasing. We’re adding more and more assets, slowing down sites, and ruining user experience. But even though we’ve identified the problem, we still won’t take responsibility. Instead, we lean on coders to streamline their output—we ask then to drop useful libraries like jQuery, just because it saves us 80kb. Meanwhile, we’re designing layouts with 1mb images. If we’re serious about making our sites fast (and we should be), if we’re serious about improving UX (and we should be), if we’re serious about boosting SEO (and we should be), then we need to do something about the real culprit: images. Images are by far the biggest bloat on sites. And due to the type of images they suit, JPGs are the biggest bloat on the web. Today we’re going to...