Every image on every free actor website has been moved onto a global delivery network. In practice that means a casting director in Sydney is no longer waiting for your headshot to travel from a data center in the United States.
The problem with one server
Distance costs time and there is no way around it. A request from Australia to a machine in Texas takes roughly two hundred milliseconds each way before anything useful happens, and a page with twenty images does that handshake twenty times. It is not a bandwidth problem, so a faster connection does not fix it.
For actors this matters more than it does for most site owners, because the whole point of having a site is that somebody who has never met you, possibly in a different country, can look you up.
What changed
- Images are stored once and cached at edge locations worldwide.
- A visitor is served from the nearest one automatically.
- Repeat visits are served from cache, so a return visitor waits for almost nothing.
- The delivery network also handles format conversion and resizing, which is what makes modern image formats and resize on upload possible.
What you had to do
Nothing. Existing images were migrated in place, the addresses that appear on your pages were rewritten, and nothing needed re-uploading. If you had linked directly to an image file from somewhere external, the old address still resolves.
The measured effect
Median time to first image, tested from five continents against a representative gallery page, dropped by 61 percent. The improvement is largest exactly where it matters most, which is a long way from where our servers happen to live.
Where this sits
This is one of four pieces of work on image performance, alongside lazy-loading galleries, next-generation formats and upload-time resizing. Together they took the average actor site's photo payload down by roughly 90 percent.
Speed is a ranking factor and a bounce factor, which we cover in SEO for actor websites. It is also just politeness toward people looking at your work on a train.
Create a free actor website and your images get all of this from the first upload.
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