Automatic Modern Formats Mean Smaller Files and Sharper Photos
Every image on your actor website is now delivered in the best format the visitor's browser can accept. In most cases that is a modern format that produces a file roughly a third the size of the equivalent JPEG at the same visual quality.
Smaller and better at the same time
This normally sounds like a trick, because for twenty years the choice was between a big file that looked good and a small file that looked compressed. Newer formats genuinely changed that arithmetic. The same photograph, encoded well, is both smaller and cleaner, particularly in the smooth gradients that skin tones are made of. Compression artifacts around a face are exactly the thing that makes a headshot look cheap.
How it works
- You upload whatever you have. JPEG, PNG, HEIC from a phone, TIFF from a photographer.
- We keep your original untouched.
- When somebody visits, we look at what their browser supports and deliver the best available format at the size that page actually needs.
- Older browsers get a JPEG, so nothing breaks anywhere.
What actors will notice
Photo pages that appear immediately rather than filling in. Headshots that hold detail in hair and fabric where they used to smear. And, for anyone browsing on mobile data, a site that uses a fraction of the allowance it used to.
Do not sharpen or compress before uploading
A common instinct is to run photos through a compressor first to be helpful. Please do not. Compressing an already-compressed image is where quality actually goes, and we are going to re-encode it anyway. Upload the best file your photographer gave you. Our note on automatic resizing covers the same point about dimensions.
The wider effect on your site
Across the whole platform this change removed about 40 percent of the remaining bytes on a typical actor site, on top of what lazy loading and the delivery network had already taken out. A typical page is now lighter than the single headshot at the top of it used to be.
That matters for search, for phones, and for the plain fact that a fast site feels professional in a way that is hard to name and easy to notice.
Create your free actor website and every photograph you upload gets this treatment automatically.
