Unnecessarily large images in this satsig.net forum

Visitors to this forum are very welcome to include images in their messages, using this example format:

Code:

[img]https://yourwebsitename/filename.jpg[/img]

Important note: Many visitors use mobile phone type devices and slow 4G connections.

This means they will get a disappointing and poor impression of your message if the file sizes of the images is too large.

A recent example had images totalling more than 1 Mbyte and took over 10 seconds to load. This is not acceptable.

Please note that in such blatant cases I download the relevant image and resave it using better compression. In the above case page load time on a slow 4G connection was reduced to under 2 seconds, which is acceptable.

If possible, please try to get your images no more than 750 pixels wide and compressed to well under 20k bytes per image.

The allowed image file types are: jpg gif png JPG PNG GIF

I will be trying to get webp image file type to work by modifying the software that runs this forum.

Best regards and welcome again to forum posters!. Eric.

21 April 2026: Modified to 768 pixels wide. The key thing is to get the total page download time under 2.5 seconds for a real 'field' user, and not just fast for a test environment or someone with fast internet access. The 'field users' of this web site tend to be people in remote locations with slow internet access. Google appears to be recording LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). These times and when some pages take in excess of 20 second to download the aggregate average for all forum pages for all 'field' measurements tends to go above 2.5 seconds leading to Google lowering the search results for the many satsig forum pages.

21 April: 982 forum pages are presently deemed inacceptable so I have my work cut out reducing user-inputted images file sizes.

29 April 2026: Further update

I have been working on analysing forum pages that involve large images.

My challenge is to get the average download time (strictly LCP Largest Contentful Paint )for actual 'field' mobile phone users on slow 4G connections to under 2.5 seconds.

I am processing any large image files I find and uploading replacements to the server. The worst case found so far was an image of 95.7 Mbytes which was taking more than 5 minutes to download. This could clearly upset the average of all the forum pages, this getting them all downgraded in Google search. My average today is 2.8 seconds which is bad and 1150 forum pages are being failed by Google.

I reduced the 95.7Mbyte image to 10.7kbytes with no visible loss of quality!.
Recommends:
Use images no more than 768 pixels wide.
Keep files size small using jpg processing (below 2k if possible).
Avoid png file type if jpg is better for small file size.
Don't use webp file type as old user devices don't accept this.
Try to keep total of multiple images to under 80K bytes.

I have increased the number of text characters allowed in posts from 8000 to 9000 as many posts were pushing the 8000 limit.

Best regards. Eric