My website is loading fast enough but the images are taking too long. Why?

Your image files are too big. I'd also add that you might not have noticed that in computerland: storage is measured in bytes, the big 'B'; transmission is measured in bits, the small 'b'. A byte is eight bits, but a rule of thumb is to multiply by ten in practice to account for the chatty nature of http, handshakes, headers and stuff. Your 450 KB (stored) images will be about 4.5 Mb transmitted when you download the file. (Note the KiloBytes, Megabits) In passing, I should mention that the other most common erroneous abbreviations are mb and mB, which would logically refer to millibits and millibytes. These have not yet been invented, but will be very useful if they are. (I've corrected your question details to reflect the norm. If, perchance, your connection speed is really measured in megabytes-per-second, change back the small 'b' in 'Mbps' to big 'B'. But they're typically megabits per second. Apologies in advance, if required)

Also try to host images on a subdomain(s) which allows parallel downloading. CDNs are expensive and you should try the subdomain option first.

I would disregard the other answers. They are only relevant to large scale sites. Any host can handle your site as you described it. It's not bad information, just only relevant to sites that see hundreds of thousands or more unique visitors per day. I handle 50,000 uniques a day on a 10.00 a month host. The problem is you have 450K images. Your connection is 1Mb/s so using the best case scenario... .45 seconds per image. And remember, you won't ever get best case, perhaps 70-80% on average.  You have a total of 2 seconds on image download time at your best connection speed. Make your images smaller. If that's not possible, optimize them better and be sure to use the correct format. Ie: jpg, gif, png. Even huge hi-res images rarely need to be 450k. Maybe 50k more accurately. You have a relatively slow connection, your images are not optimized, and could be in the wrong format. If you are scaling your images in HtHL that's the biggest problem. For example, if your image is 1000x1000 px and you want to show it on the page as a thumbnail of 100x100 px, you need to reduce the image within an image editing app. But many do this: ...img src="file.jpg" height="100" width= "100"... That will indeed make it look small, but all 10,000 pixels still have to download.

Maybe because you have too many photos on your site and it takes a while to load all of them. Providing this is your site, there are a dew tricks you can use to optimise loading experience. When you save a picture, tick on the checkbox of "Progressive" in Photoshop. This will render your picture gradually, giving an image of low resolution first and refine later. This will help user have an idea of the image as a place holder before the image fully load, reminding them about a picture loading. Use a placeholder with smaller size while the images are loading (similar to the current facebook web), or you can use a code to take the dominent color of the photo being load and use that as a placeholder (similar to Pinterest). When there are a lot of images, user will not see them all at once, you can use a Jquery plugin to load images when user scroll to that ảea, reducing the load when page is opened. I am on my phone, cant find the link for you now, sorry. When user is on this page and you know it's likely that they will navigate to a particular page, you can use pre-loading codes to load the images of that page when user is still on this page, also reduce a lot of loading task. Hope this will help :)

Serve your content from nginx using mod pagespeed . It will help in serving content fast . Then upload your pics to cdn and serve them using subdomain if there are many images.

It may be that images may not be optimized and you end up downloading much more information than you could if the images were better compressed. Use the Google Page Speed tool to determine if that is the case. http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ Another thing is that usually browsers limit simultaneous requests to 2 per domain. If you have all your images being downloaded from the same domain, the browser only downloads at most two images at once. You may want to split images over several domains or use a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Use a tool like: http://www.vertain.com/?sst If your server is overloaded, you may well be seeing slow transfers. Without seeing the page, its impossible to say. There could be code taking time to load, which is slowing down the images, Post a link to your site, and we can provide much more specific feedback.

Using Sub-Domain like http://images[DOT]example[DOT}com/ which points to images sub-folder and accessing images from this URL helps us loading images faster. Use techniques like LazyLoad or load low quality image first and on load of page change them to normal images using JS. Optimizing Images may help you, use PINGDOM or GTMETRIX for more help.

Before going with a CDN I will recommend you check the encoding of the images but also try nginx or varnish as a way for serving images.