What's up with gigantic images and page load speed on Spree marketing site? https://spreecommerce.org/

[vfonic]

Context

I understand that Spree is a great long-running project where a lot of people invested their time and built amazing functionality. It's great to see Spree receiving updates and adding new functionality!

I'm exploring the eternal dilemma of Spree vs Solidus for my next project. I'm currently in Costa Rica where internet is not the fastest. It takes a good 5 seconds to have the homepage hero slider first image load. The image is 500KB+, in a PNG format. Why is this not a JPEG or WebP?

Here are two screen recordings

https://github.com/spree/spree/assets/67437/536f3618-b69f-40c0-906d-b0ea3002ce81

https://github.com/spree/spree/assets/67437/68d405d5-d9f5-4630-b8d3-eefb032ec876

Here's Solidus homepage loading speed. It's insanely fast.

https://github.com/spree/spree/assets/67437/1c4f2770-c22b-4e15-94b5-449a004449ed

Here's PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) comparison:

Spree	Solidus

It's even worse on mobile:

Spree	Solidus

Expected Behavior

The page loads fast and it feels premium.

Actual Behavior

The page loads slow, making me think Spree is slow and not a good option for my future project(s).

Possible Fix

Optimize images. And convert them to JPG where possible. Not everyone is on fiber optics all the time, especially not on mobile.

I used ImageOptim and compressed the homepage slider image by 69.8% (!!!) and dev docs image by 71.1%!

Just in case, here are the optimized images

[vfonic]

This image: https://spreecommerce.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/slider-inner-1-bg-shaded.jpg

Is 220KB on this page: https://spreecommerce.org/use-cases/international-sales-demo/

Why?

Compressed in 2 seconds with ImageOptim, it's 10KB!

Please, compress your images...