SVG-Compression for Vanillicons 2 ?
phreak
MVP
Hi all,
I regulary run Google Pagespeed tests on my forums to check for improvements. SEO-wise this helped my discussions a lot to be found on the internet and supported community growth in the last years.
Pagespeed recommends that the Vanillicons (version 2) i use on the mobile site could be compressed to reduce filesize of around 60% of every SVG image. Sounds a lot, but SVGs are already quite small. Still when you have (as me) a lot of comments on one page and so also sometimes up to 50 Vanillicons per page this could still improve the speed for mobile users and show the will of optimiziation to Google.
So the question is? Would it be wise to do that and would @Linc, @Tim and the team pick up on this?
It seems to make sense for Google Rankings.
An Example:http://wd.vanillicon.com/v2/e7d10d096229614861863c05a6696b48.svg
What do you say?
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Comments
Vanillicon is @Todd's domain.
Calling @Todd. :=)
IIRC, these are generated based on a hash of the email address. I am sure there are some potential improvements (file size) that have been dropped to increase maintenance costs.
A simple script I have that uses Ink Scape to write optimized SVGs (without changing visuals) only reduced the size from 4.08 kb to 3.52 kb.
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Just tested compression with that guy: http://w3.vanillicon.com/v2/3f94cba4c183d0a0b9b39168e36603ef.svg
That's the picture url I got from the recent discussions overview where you could easily have several dozen avatars.
SVG size (before compression): 2.984 Bytes
SVGZ size (after compression): 1.646 Bytes
In percentages, this is a big advantage. Also I assume that Vanillicons are cashed on the server so that it is a one time extra calculation to not only create them, but also compress them.
On the other hand, if you really have to fetch 50 Vanillicons for one page, the bottleneck might be that you have to have 50 connections. If 4kb are transferred per request or 2kb might not be such a difference.
But if there is something that could be optimized, why not?
Super, thank you guys for looking into it. Let's wait for the Vanilla team on some feedback. Everything that speeds up makes Vanilla better in Performance and SERPs, what could lead to more activity in forums so better communities and revenue options. Even if it's small changes. My forums for example have to shoulder also quite some weight from AdServer Javascript Ad-Tags and so forth, so it's worth every 10 kilobyte won.
Hey @Todd, is this something considerable. @R_J outlined pretty could what could be achieved. Would be great, to have this on the Vanillicon roadmap to speed up all the Vanilla forums.