Optimising GIFs for the Web
In this article Ira takes us through ways that we can optimise a gif for fast loading. The first step is, ironically, not to use a GIF at all but instead use a video with a fallback to the GIF format if the video format (WEBM in this case) is not supported.
However, a problem with this is that GIFs are heavy, the one above is a whopping 11.4 MB 😱 (NB: not exactly the image above, I couldn’t actually load that on a page). Recently, I’ve found that some of my articles that are GIF-heavy tend to get incredibly slow. The reason for this is that each frame in a GIF is stored as a GIF image, which uses a lossless compression algorithm. This means that, during compression, no information is lost in the image at all, which of course results in a larger file size.
An excerpt from Optimising GIFs for the Web
