Corrections and Changelog

This page lists changes that affect what a reader can rely on: new data, corrected numbers, rewritten guides and changes to how the site works. The newest changes are at the top. Minor spelling or layout fixes may be made without an entry.

October 18, 2026: new test series and site relaunch

New measurements

• Built a new test bench (described on the About and methodology pages) and a fixed corpus of 20 CC0 and public-domain photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited on the new image credits page.
• Ran more than 1,300 encodes of JPEG, WebP and AVIF scored with SSIMULACRA2, DSSIM and SSIM; loading experiments in Chrome on throttled profiles with 3 to 7 runs per variant; and tests on this WordPress site itself (uploads, generated sizes, AVIF handling).
• Rewrote all 17 existing guides around those results. Each now states its question, the test, a results table, figures generated from the data, what did not work, its limits and a link to the raw CSV. The repeated boilerplate paragraphs that appeared in every guide were removed; how tests are run is now explained once, on the methodology page.
• Six new guides are scheduled for publication between October 21 and November 5, 2026: WebP quality by image type, AVIF uploads in WordPress, lossless screenshots, Chrome’s lazy-loading distance, chroma subsampling and AVIF encoder effort.
• Published 77 further guides from new tests, bringing the site to 100 guides including the scheduled ones. They cover encoding settings, browser behaviour (how Chrome discovers, prioritises, caches and decodes images), responsive delivery, Lighthouse’s image audits, WordPress’s own image handling and measurements of this site. Two new categories, Browser behaviour and Lighthouse audits, group them.

Corrections made during testing

• High-DPI test: the first run used a 3:2 crop whose heights did not divide evenly, and the resulting sub-pixel misalignment distorted the quality scores. It was discarded and repeated with a 16:9 crop.
• Loading tests: the first fixture pages lacked height: auto for images with dimensions, which stretched them. All loading experiments were repeated after the fix. The layout-shift test was also repeated with a controlled image delay, because without it the images arrived before the first paint on mobile and no shift could occur.
• Priority test: the script initially read the timing of a thumbnail instead of the hero image. The timing columns were corrected and the test repeated over both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.
• Chrome updated itself from version 153 to 154 and then 155 during the series. Each guide names the version its data came from.
• Alt text guide: our description of the market test photo was wrong. It shows the entrance of a fruit and vegetable market under a red sign, not a market stall, and the photo’s source does not say where it was taken. The guide now says so and uses the mistake as an example of what Lighthouse cannot catch.
• Hero bytes guide: the 1600-pixel hero was enlarged from a 1200-pixel working copy; the guide now states this.
• Image discovery test: a variable declared twice made the external script fail in the first run, so one method was missing. The test was fixed and repeated.
• Object-fit test: the first run read the browser’s density-corrected naturalWidth instead of the file’s real width, and ran before its images existed. It was corrected and repeated.

Site changes

• New site design with a named author byline (Daniel Vega, the pen name of the site’s operator), publication and update dates, a table of contents, related guides and category pages with their own introductions.
• Rewrote the About, editorial policy, contact, accessibility, terms and privacy pages to describe who runs the site and how the tests are made.
• Rewrote both tool pages with worked examples, measured limits and screenshots, and fixed the image optimizer’s layout overflowing on narrow phone screens.
• Removed illustration images that were not test material from the guides’ featured images.
• Article images now use WordPress-generated WebP sizes with srcset, a sizes value that matches the reading column, width and height, and lazy loading below the first screen.
• Fixed a layout shift on our own pages. Lighthouse runs on the relaunched site (Chrome 155, three runs per page) measured a median Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.50 to 0.59 on phones and about 1.0 on desktop for the home page, the guide index, the About page and a tool page. The shifts moved the whole page and only occurred with the external stylesheet and the asynchronous advertising script together, as described in our layout shift investigation. The theme’s styles are now inline in each page, and the same runs measured a CLS of 0 to 0.005 on those four pages, with the advertising code unchanged. The two links under the home page introduction were also stacked on narrow screens, because the web font changed where they wrapped.
• Enabled the page cache of the caching plugin already installed on the site, with its HTML, CSS and JavaScript optimisation options left off. HTML pages now answer in about 193 ms instead of 358–420 ms from our test machine; see the page cache measurement.
• Archive pages no longer force loading="lazy" on every card. WordPress now decides, giving the first card fetchpriority="high"; see the archive lazy-loading test. The cards’ sizes value was also rewritten to match the grid, which cut desktop image bytes on the category archives by up to 40 %.
• Reworded five figure descriptions whose alt text contained ” sizes=”, which made WordPress leave out the images’ sizes attribute; see the alt text quirk.

August 12, 2026: first measured studies and mobile fixes

• Added measured sections to five guides using synthetic test images (a codec ladder, a transparency fixture, responsive candidates and a controlled EXIF test). These were superseded by the October tests on real photographs.
• Stopped loading advertising code on 404 pages and on searches with no results.
• Made wide tables scroll inside their own container on narrow screens, and fixed an unreadable colour combination caused by an invalid CSS declaration.

August 9, 2026: navigation corrections

• Fixed the guides archive pagination so every guide appeared once.
• Added canonical links to archives and redirected empty author and Uncategorized archives to useful pages.
• Corrected copy-ready markup examples and added image height output to the srcset builder.

August 3, 2026: launch

• Published the first seventeen guides, the methodology, editorial, privacy, cookie, accessibility and terms pages, and the two browser tools.

Report a problem

Use the contact page with the page URL, the statement or number in question, your test environment and, if possible, your own measurement. Do not send confidential images or HAR files that contain private data.