I seriously can't be the only one with this issue.
My client is in the furniture business.
They have a ton of fabric options for their products.
I'm using the Image Square attribute.
One main dropdown and 4 conditional groups (solid, textured, striped and patterned fabrics).
All-in-all, there are about 600 image squares per product.
I'm having major performance issues on those product pages.
Here's what I've done:
- Multiple thumb directories in Media Settings
- Default image quality lowered to 40%
- Super compressed images. 250x250 pixels averaging 5KB.
Analyzing the page, the image square thumbs are less than 1kb so the total load should be around 600kb which isn't great but also isn't bad.
First time opening a product page takes a long time and usually times out.
I understand why - the system creates several thumbs etc.
But next time it still takes up to a minute to open the page which is unacceptable.
So, what can I do?
The minimum would be to at least open the page while the thumbs are loading - not wait until everything has loaded.
That makes no sense to me and page abandonment is naturally way too high.
Ideally, I would like the image square attributes to only load the thumbs when the user takes action on the page - i.e., click the drop down.
Anyone have any suggestions?