Who is on a slow connection
It is easy to assume everyone has fast, stable internet. Many readers do not. People in rural areas, on crowded public networks, on mobile plans with limited data, or traveling often see pages load slowly or not at all. Others use older phones with limited processing power. Some pay for data by the amount used, so a large page costs them real money.
Exhibit sites are especially vulnerable because their main attraction is images. A single uncompressed photograph can be larger than the rest of a page combined. The aim is not to strip away visual richness but to deliver it in a way that degrades gracefully when conditions are poor.
Start by looking at what the page weighs
Before optimizing, measure. Browser developer tools show every file a page downloads and how large each is. Run a test with the connection speed deliberately slowed, which most browsers allow. Watch what appears first, what appears last, and how long a reader waits before they can read anything.
You will usually find that a few items cause most of the delay: oversized images, large video files that start loading automatically, custom fonts, and scripts that do nothing the reader notices. Fixing the biggest few often matters more than polishing many small things.
Make images the right size
Images are the main lever. Several habits help.
- Resize to the display size. A photograph taken at very high resolution does not need to be sent in full to a phone screen. Provide several sizes and let the browser choose the one that fits. The principles of image resolution and file formats apply here: more pixels than the screen can show are wasted bytes.
- Use efficient formats. Modern image formats generally achieve a given quality at a smaller file size than older ones, though support varies, so provide a fallback.
- Compress with care. Reduce quality until the difference is just noticeable, then step back. Art and object photography may need gentler compression than casual snapshots, since color and fine detail are the point.
- Avoid text baked into images. Text inside an image is heavy, cannot be resized by the reader and is invisible to screen readers.
Keep the full-quality version available for those who want it, perhaps behind a “view larger image” option, rather than forcing everyone to download it.
Load things when they are needed
An exhibit page may hold dozens of images, but a reader sees only a few at a time. Lazy loading tells the browser to fetch an image only when the reader scrolls near it. This can sharply reduce the initial load. Pair it with fixed reserved spaces so the page does not jump around as images arrive, which is frustrating on a slow connection.
Do the same with video and audio. Do not start downloading a video until the reader presses play, and show a still frame with a clear label of the file size or length. Offer a transcript, which is light to load and valuable to people who cannot or prefer not to play media. Captions and transcripts for exhibit media are good practice regardless of connection speed.
Keep the page simple
Heavy design features cost bandwidth and processing. Consider:
- Using the fonts already on the reader’s device, or a very small number of custom fonts.
- Avoiding large background videos and decorative animation.
- Limiting scripts and third-party widgets. Each outside service adds requests and a point of failure.
- Placing the main text early, so the reader can start before images finish.
A page where the words arrive first and images follow is far more usable than a page that shows nothing until everything is ready. Describing images in text also helps people on poor connections, because the alternative text appears while the picture is still loading, and people with low vision or those who rely on screen readers benefit as well.
Offer a lighter way in
Some exhibits benefit from a deliberately light version. A text-first view of each object, a simple list of items with small thumbnails, or a version without videos can serve people who need it. Be careful not to hide such options. Place them where users can find them and label them plainly.
Heavy interactive features, such as panoramas and 3D object viewers, deserve special thought. Provide a still image and a short description as the default, and let people choose to load the interactive version. Say roughly how large it is, in cautious terms, so readers can decide.
Think about caching and repeat visits
Once an image has been downloaded, the browser can reuse it. Configuring the server so that unchanging files are stored for a long time makes repeat visits and page-to-page navigation much faster. Reusing the same images and styles across pages, rather than slightly different copies, supports this. Where an exhibit is designed for use in a place with poor signal, consider whether the site should work partly offline, which is covered separately in the discussion of offline mode.
Test like a real visitor
Testing on a fast office network hides most of these problems. Check pages on a throttled connection, on an older phone if you have access to one, and in a variety of browsers. If possible, ask a few people in different locations to try the exhibit and report what they experience. Set a simple budget for page size and loading time at the start of the project and check against it at each stage, as it is much harder to slim down a finished site.
Fast pages tend to help everyone. They are friendlier to search engines, kinder to batteries and data plans, and more robust on days when the network misbehaves. The aim is not perfection, but an exhibit that remains readable when conditions are poor.