My clients that I built the below website for have been experiencing long load times for the gallery on the website. I ran the largest gallery page on the website and received the below results. A “D” on first byte time and F’s in cache and compression of images. Any incite or assistance on how we can improve these results would be appreciated. Thank You!
The image compression is probably the biggest deal. Granted, the photos are the main purpose of the site so you have to be really careful but it is usually impossible to visually distinguish jpegs saved at quality level 85 from higher levels (photoshop uses a different scale).
It looks like most of the thumbnails were saved at a much higher quality level and ~3/4 of the bytes for serving the page can be saved just by using a lower quality level when saving the images (7+MB in savings is nothing to sneeze at and it won’t be visually different).
It also looks like none of the images have caching headers. Using a plugin like W3 Total Cache can help or you can just add some to the .htaccess file so that anything in the wp-content directory and below gets a long expires. That will make navigating back to the gallery significantly faster.
Once those are taken care of there will probably be other things that you can do but those are an absolutely critical starting point.
It looks like his images are all ready compressed a bit to much for my taste. I think that flash gallery is scaling down for thumbs, bad idea. That’s why your getting the low score for compression. A 200 image gallery is going to have load problems always. I would find a non flash gallery and break images into smaller sets with an index page.
You do also need “Cache static content” as mentioned above, but that won’t help the first load.
P.S. You also might consider installing your photo galleries outside of WP. Would give you more options.