Using an iphone in 3rd world country can hurt you

Recently, I was doing speed test on a new website for a client, and I was puzzled by Chrome's report saying that my images were too big.

I looked at the details and it seems like the browser is using a way bigger image than what I think it should use. All my images use srcset with w descriptor to provide different sizes of images for different device resolution, and on iphone it shows an image of 2600px being used. dang. How can it be so big when the phone screen is relatively small? I spent hours thinking it was a bug and tried various ways to fix it.

It turned out that new devices have this thing called DPR (device pixel ratio), and apparently high end devices may have very high DPR such as 3 or even more. What it means is that now if the normal css pixel is 500, you need an image of 1500px for the given device.

This can have huge impact on the site performance because the device needs to download 3 times more data (more or less). For third world countries like mine where 4g feels sluggish, this can really delay the rendering of the site. For the clients they have to wait longer, and also unknowingly pay for more bandwidth.

Do we really need those big images? Only sometimes. And should not come at the cost of potential users abandon the site due to slow load.

For people using lazysizes, you can use the optimumux plugin to set the optimal DPR. The default is 1.6 mx which is reasonable IMHO.

For above the fold content which should not be loaded lazily IMHO, I'm looking into the setting of srcset with the x descriptor and sizes. I will update this post once I have a solid answer.