Hi everyone, I run a boutique e-commerce site and I am really struggling to balance my page load speeds with image quality. My niche requires incredibly high-resolution photos. We specialize in South Asian bridal wear, and if you look at our nikah dresses, they feature extremely intricate hand-embroidery (like Zardozi and dabka).
Because we use materials like pure raw silk and organza, our customers expect to be able to zoom all the way in to see the tactile details of the silver threading and cut-dana work. When I compress the images too much, the embroidery just looks like a blurry, pixelated mess. Right now, I am using lazy loading and serving WebP, but my core web vitals are still taking a hit on mobile.
Has anyone made the full switch to AVIF for heavy image payloads? Did you notice a significant drop in quality for micro-details, or is the compression algorithm better for preserving sharp lines like embroidery? Would love to hear how other visual-heavy stores are handling this!