More Optimisation and Tweaks!


Posted: 2018-03-17 16:56:54 |    Posted by iDev |    idevgames.co.uk

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I have made a few small changes to the site recently and a few optimisations. Something that is pretty important these days is site speed. No one likes waiting for a site to load and although the site was pretty quick already once cached, initial load times is the most important for retaining new visitors on the site. Even though adding your game will only need an icon image and a promo image, when actually displaying a lot of different games on a single page like the homepage it will all add up. 

So I have now developed a compressing feature for game images. I learned a few things as well, I wasn't aware before but JPEG seems to be much easier to compress and far more effective when being compressed. So although you are still required to upload your images in the PNG format, the system will convert your promo image automatically to JPEG and then compress. Icon images remain as PNG as JPEG does not support transparency. Also the promo images are the largest meaning they are far bigger in file size. 

As an example from one game. 

 

Original size 

Promo.png: 172,579b 

 

New size 

Promo.jpg: 92,663b 

 

That's almost half what it originally was. It also means that on twitter and facebook the images are loaded a lot faster, which could mean the potential of more visitors. I also made a few more speed optimisation tweaks which might be noticeable for everyone too. 

You won't need to do anything differently either as the system will automatically compress your images when you upload new ones and all the current images have already been compressed. 

Apart from that I have also added something I haven't mentioned yet. If you haven't noticed in the footer you can now see the total time as a collective time spent in game by players. It's not a feature that is supported by every browser so it might not be 100% accurate but it is a great estimate and a statistic that I think is very important. This was already available to the developers personally for each game that can be found on the games statistics page and was integrated earlier last year. The time is recorded while a player is interacting with the game and won't count the time when the game is minimised or the player is idle. So it aims to deliver a true insight into how long players are interacting with our games. 

I've also changed the games and new games etc pages to display 20 games per a page. Before it was only five so this makes browsing through games easier.  

Thanks, 

-iDev 

 

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention too, that you may have noticed the facebook widget has now gone. I guess its not surprising to find out that the facebook widget pulls a lot of Javascript files which was heavily weighing the site down. So I had to remove it from the site.

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