Performance: improve image loading

[jakerenzella]

Change

Starts work on some approaches to improve the initial load time of the frontend by converting image assets to webp at build time.

Change reason

Currently, the initial load time of the CSESOC website sits at about 5 seconds, mainly loading the large, non-optimised assets in the carousel. There's a few issues here, the images aren't web-optimised, and it seems the is carousel blocking rendering below-the-fold of the site until all images have downloaded.

There are a few ways to solve this:

1. Approach started in this PR adds a build step to the Vue site via a webpack plugin to optimise the assets (compressing + converting to webp). Some of the individual images are ~2MB each.
2. Further enhancement and optimisations can be made, such as lazy loading the images (so as to not block rendering as they load) - no work on this has been commenced but is a good idea for someone to look into.
3. Pre-optimise your assets as webp (easy, but can be addressed by point 1 with less long-term effort).

Once complete, load times should drastically improve.

Comments

This is a draft PR and implements the basic tools required to do this, however I'm not a Vue expert and there are a few small things blocking progress (such as not being able to solve the webp files, which makes sense as they are not yet generated). Someone with more Vue experience should be able to take this and continue.

If you all are happy with this direction I am happy to continue contributing (but I will be slow).

[Varun-Sethu]

Hey Jake, thanks for the PR and the time you've put into it! We never noticed the really long load times and we're happy to continue the PR from here if you're short on time, otherwise we'd be grateful if you continued. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

[jakerenzella]

No worries! A quick fix in the interim I would recommend would be to pre-optimise the static assets using imagemin then committing them, then you can work on longer term enhancements :)

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On Tue, 22 Mar 2022 at 2:20 pm, Varun Sethu ***@***.***> wrote: Hey Jake, thanks for the PR and the time you've put into it! We never noticed the really long load times and we're happy to continue the PR from here if you're short on time, otherwise we'd be grateful if you continued. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#227 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABHGOKWJL52BOTEUIYRKKZ3VBE377ANCNFSM5RH2333A> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>