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I am implementing a product image slider for an ecommerce website.

I want to make sure that the page is nice and fast for SEO purposes (as site speed is a factor in ranking). I'm not sure if it matters as the images should be loaded in the background by the web browser.

Is it ok to have all the images load up or should I load the additional images with javascript?

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  • For a slider I would load the first two (maybe three), and afterload them with JS
    – Martijn
    Sep 19, 2014 at 12:23
  • Inject the background image with style="background:url();" (or better yet a class) and most bots wont load it. If you do it this way you can use other tactics using resolution too in an attempt to fall back to non image background for mobile/slow/old users. This should trim down load times for literal bots, as well as records in analytics.
    – dhaupin
    Sep 19, 2014 at 15:13
  • I'm sure the googlebot would be smart enough to detect all these kind of tricks.
    – DD.
    Sep 21, 2014 at 1:38

2 Answers 2

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Load a couple of images immediately (enough) to display the page. Then load a couple of extras images asynchronously in background to anticipate requests from users as necessary.

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  • Images are loaded asynchrously by the web browser already. I guess my question really is does google care about image sizes?
    – DD.
    Sep 21, 2014 at 1:41
  • Google cares about speed, so if your images are huge or not compressed, it make take some time to load them, which may degrade user experience. Google want to deliver good user experience. Sep 22, 2014 at 20:47
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i would suggest you should load all images faster on the page. Compress it or use css sprite feature to make your website load faster.

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    Most popular image formats are already compressed so that's not going to help. CSS Sprite isnt going to help the file size of the page either (it will only lessen the requests).
    – DD.
    Sep 21, 2014 at 1:37

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