August 31, 2020 — Pictures and logos are a necessity on a website, but not all images are created equal. The wrong images could slow down your site or even worse, cause users to leave before your page loads. Speaker Kim White will walk through the basics of the most used image format types and some optimization techniques. She will also do a review of what WordPress does when you upload your image file.

July 11, 2020 — With so many image sizes the upload process can take minutes to finish, or never does! If you Google it there are probably 20 “best” plugins to fix this. I’ll explain what goes on in WordPress from upload to viewing the image on a post and cover the ways we can speed up the process.
The Pitch
I’ve taken over support for sites with as many as 45 image sizes, do you even know how many your largest sites have? For the vast majority of sites out there this is far too many, but even if you have 20 or 10 WordPress may be getting bogged down during a bulk upload, or worse your site may go down temporarily.
The Focus
I’ll show you the steps I take to identify how many images you have, what is creating them and how to begin to reduce that number or simply offload the processing. You will come away from the presentation with a broader understanding of WordPress as well as external solutions available to us.
Questions Answered
• I only use one size on our site, why does WordPress generate so many unused sizes? • How much do more advanced ways of processing images cost? • My developer tells me that… (you fill in the blank), is that right?

Presentation Slides »

September 16, 2019 — “We all like to look at pictures, it’s what makes websites draw in the reader.

In this session, Christina Hills will show you some easy tips to make working with images much easier for you.

Best practices for the featured image and how to get it to show up correctly when you share on Social Media.

How to organize, compress, and store your images in your media library, for faster load times.

Plus where to find high quality, low cost (and free) images to make your website stunning.

You will walk away with practical tips and skills you can use right away whether you are a business owner, free lancer, or just starting out learning WordPress.”

August 26, 2019 — A walk-though of the current way that image uploads are handled in WordPress, and some of the improvements coming in 5.3. Attendees will learn about the limitations and strengths of the current systems, and hear thoughts on how this can be improved in the future.

August 6, 2019 — In my 15 years of overall web dev experience, 10 years of direct WP work, I still see the same mistakes being made. Image sizes. In my opinion, this is one of the quickest ways to bring a great website to its demise. So I’d like to highlight the importance of web-sized and dimension photos, the impact it has on your hosting server, and how to better handle uploading pics moving forward.

Takeaways:
What images to use where
Image dimensions and sizes for websites
Server load and overall website processes attributed to loading images

April 23, 2019 — Abha Thakor, from Non Stop Business Support, will present a short overview of things to consider when working with images on the web.

April 3, 2019 — Many people assume incorrectly that any font or image they buy can be used on their WordPress site. However this assumption could end up costing you a lot of money. Learn the ins and outs of what you can and cannot do and how to protect yourself.

March 29, 2019 — Web browsers limit the number of active connections for each domain, but browsers distinguish domains by name rather than by IP address. Domain sharding, in which content is split across multiple subdomains, may drastically improve the user experience of slow page load times for image-heavy pages, but only if your server has sufficient bandwidth. Uploading content to Amazon S3 and using CloudFront to serve images from multiple subdomains has been shown to be an effective way to use domain sharding. In addition, when images are uploaded to S3, a Node.js script is triggered which creates thumbnails and the larger web versions of the full sized, high resolution images. The final step happens during the creation of a WordPress custom post type, where the domain sharding is actually applied.

March 18, 2019 — Tras una pequeña, y casi obligada, introducción en el que intentaremos
sentar conceptos sobre las imágenes digitales, nos meteremos de lleno
en intentar comprender el funcionamiento de los formatos más empleados en la web: JPEG y PNG.

Conociendo cómo trabajan estos formatos y algunas de sus variaciones,
mejoraremos nuestra capacidad para decidir qué formato nos conviene y
qué opciones tocar para conseguir una mejor optimización.

Veremos qué podemos modificar con un software de edición fotográfica,
algunas aplicaciones para optimizar imágenes y, como no, algunos plugins para WordPress.

Para ir terminando, pasaremos por encima de algunos formatos
alternativos que nos propone Google.

¿Es viable emplear alguno de estos
formatos?

Presentation Slides »

January 22, 2019 — In this talk I aim to explore some of the main issues that surround SVG uploads and why we’ve not seen this feature in WordPress yet. We’ll also look into why they need to be sanitised and the problems that can occur if we don’t properly secure them.