

Pro and contra of images encoded as data URI for performance purpose - Undead-SEO
http://undead-seo.blogspot.com/2014/09/images-as-base64-encoded-data-uri-pro-and-contra.html

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verisimilitude
I've always loved this method. I think partly because I went through a phase
where I was obsessed with those waterfalls which illustrate your webpage
loading (like the one here:
[http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/c3jfDt/http://tumbledry.org/...](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/c3jfDt/http://tumbledry.org/alex/)
); used to take a look at what goes on when I load a page of my website.

I'm of two minds on this, part of me thinks that 88.8kB is an enormous page
for the three paragraphs of text on that "about" page, and the other half gave
up and loads giant 2x images by default on my homepage because I didn't want
to deal with two copies of every size of an image (I know, I know). Also, my
site gets very little traffic, so nobody cares.

Anyhow, two minds.

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agenticarus2
At least two of these 'Contras' seem naively addressable (that browsers don't
cache them and that crawlers don't decode them).

If we continue to put low value images in these base64 encoded images we won't
encourage crawlers to take them seriously.

