Images on the web
When was the last time you visited a website without any images? You might be thinking that this is a hard question to answer. Images are a critical part of websites and our browsing experience. We use images for logos, products, profiles, and marketing to convey information, entice, or excite through a visual medium. While images are great for these use cases (and many more!), they are the single largest contributor to page size. According to the HTTP Archive (https://httparchive.org/), the median page size on desktops is 2,124 KB. Images make up 973 KB of this size, which is roughly 45% of the total page size.
As images are so integral to our browsing experience, we cannot do away with them. But when they account for so much of the page size, we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that they are optimized, accessible, and as performant as possible. Newer versions of browsers (including Chrome) have responsive image capabilities built into them. Instead...
