Clearing Media Library - Increase Load Speed?

[KevinMcC]

I have over 330 images in my media library, most of which are thumbnails for the wordpress home page. Would it help speed up my loading time if I deleted them?

Thanks

[MJ]

I don't think those types of things held in a database can effect page load times, can it? Good question anyways as now I'm curious for an expert reply.

[Trikkur]

Physical hosting space should have it's own limitations compared to your actual bandwith. Those images shouldn't be slowing down page load times, barring your pages aren't calling for it to load all of them.

[KevinMcC]

Thanks guys. Another question about images... If I upload an large image and then just use the 150x150 thumbnail will it slow down the load time? Or in other words should I decrease the size of the image before uploading it to wordpress?

[MJ]

I'm curious about your last question because that's what I do on all of our daily news posts which amount to a couple hundred now.

[Ridge]

If its WP, use the super cache plugin to speed things up, one of our twilight sites has a TON of images and such and load time was a real issues. WP, html, CMS's, etc all have some type of way to cache and compress. Also DB can slow load time, so make sure you have a good host with a dedicated DB server if its a big or important website.

Always try and optimize images you are going to use, jpg's are of course the smallest you can get them, usually without killing quality. I see a lot of png now days which are always large it seems. So I try and convert any I can.

[FirstTimePokerPlayer]

I don't know how WP works exactly, but I do know that it improves your page load time if you resize your images to the resolution you need to be displayed. That is: uploading an image of the resolution you need (optimized and all) and NOT letting the browser resize the original image by setting "width='x' and heigth='x' values in your HTML lower than the original dimensions. If the image is still very large, even after optimizing it, you could consider displaying a small, optimized thumbnail which links to the original image concerned.

I always like to save my images in three different formats (png, gif and jpg), maybe play around a bit with the number of colors with the gifs or the compression with the jpg's. This is all very easy in photoshop. I then just pick the smallest sized file that still has a good image quality, mostly a gif or a png for less complex images (little colors) and jpg's for screenshots/photos. I'm far from an expert when it comes to image optimization, but I hope this is helpful nonetheless.

[themike537]

Great post FTPP, I just spent a lot of time resizing my images to avoid having the browser resize them, and it has decreased my page load time significantly.

[Mike]

If I upload an large image and then just use the 150x150 thumbnail will it slow down the load time? Or in other words should I decrease the size of the image before uploading it to wordpress?

I'm not sure this was ever really answered.

Wordpress resizes these images for you. If you look in your uploads folder, you will see the 2-3 different sized images for every image you upload. It may not be as optimized as FTPP's method of manually resizing each one, but the time saved may be worth it.