CSS background images weight impact

[GianniCuccu]

Hi,
do you think that the use of a single 1.8Mb background image sitewide could have a big negative impact and make a website disappear from SERPS?

thank you

[petrakraft]

Hi Gianni,

of course the huge image won't make the website disappear from the serps - if you define "disappear" that the website is banned from the index.

I suppose you know that speed / loading time already matters, but it is just one of many ranking factors and Matt Cutts said that very rare pages are concerned. But imagine that there is a website with exactely the same condition as yours then the one with less loading time will be "better" than yours.

Even though the image is in the css defined it is not the best idea. Did you really compress the image yet?

[krissy-cca]

Just to add - try and compress the image as much as you can.

I'd be more worried about waiting for it to load and it having a knock on effect on your user experience.

DD

[TellThemEverything]

1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.

I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.

A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.

[Riggz]

That is a pretty large image file, I do not know how it would impact the SERPS.

If you are using photoshop and saving the background image as a Jpg, one thing I always try to do is lower the quality when saving for web to around 30-40 for really large images (can notice a difference but not too bad) or lower the quality to 51 if you want the image to remain pretty much the same.

Another thing that I like to do is use Smush.it (http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/) which is a free tool from Yahoo that will save you a little on filesize without changing the appearance of the image.

Hope this helps!

[GianniCuccu]

Hello,
I think the heavy wheight background  image has been wrongly pubilshed without the proper jpg compression during last months... (maybe a webdesigner distraction).

Anyway now the website is disappeared from SERPS,

I'm trying to spot the possible reason of this penalization, currently the homepage ranks "A" with Seomoz on page optimization tool for the  primary keyword, and it's domain metrics are equals or superior to many competitors that rank in first page for the same keyword.

With this heavy wheight background image the overall wheight of the internal pages is about 2.8 Mb (html/css + scripts + inline images + css background images ), I think this is  a really uncommon and high value.

If Google considers a page as "loaded" when all of its assets were actually downloaded from the server and not when the event  "load" fires on the browser I think it could be a very negative factor.

Thank you all for your replies
(and sorry for my english)

[NickPateman81]

Hi Gianni,

There are a ton of reasons why your website might have slipped down the SERPs or dropped rankings. It's almost certainly not because of your image.

If you want, you can PM me your URL and I'll have a look.

Nick