listen up

So there is a large focus on sites being fast. Google rewards sites that load quickly and meet their speed criteria. Go ahead, run your site through googles page insight tool.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
What grade did you get? Was it under 50/100 on desktop? You won’t be alone. That’s actually pretty normal.
We have had this issue pop up many times in the last few months. So we spend a few hours tweaking the site. We minify it(compressed HTML, CSS & JS), cache it, and gzip it for the browser. This will usually bring up the speeds and scoring a bit. So thats the good news here.
This leaves us with images. We are almost always getting terrible scores because we are serving users retina images. This means the pixel density is tight, resulting in crisp, sharp images on all devices, and especially on retina screens. Unfortunately the fix for this is to basically stop serving retina images. These scoring tools are usually based on old tech. The ONLY way to serve the high res image is to compress it to the containing box. So a 400 x 400 image inside a 200 x 200 box = 2x the pixel density. But this method is a giant red F on site scoring tools because in the olden days, this was considered “wrong”.
In comparison we ran big sites like CNN, CharityWater, Vox.com, IGN.com, Mic.com, etc. And in our quick research, any nice, modern, retina ready site got about the same score as us. We used a few tools to check it. Want to know one site that ranked well? Google, yes google ranked great. See by offering few to no images, text only, and very little style, you should achieve an A rating.
So this brings me to our goals with any site. We want to serve your visitors a robust site that highlights great information, infographics and photographs that tell a story. Can we do that with low res images, sure, but thats not the direction of technology. All iPads, iPhones, most laptops over $1000 and many android phones and tablets are retina / HD displays. This means that a low res image would look worse than normal. they tend to look blurry or fuzzy.
So my two cents: We take our D+ speed rating and know that we have razor sharp images, graphics and are meeting current technology trends with ease.