I have a background image I want to use for the main navigation list on a site. The file size is about 15k. Is this too big?

I have set myself a hard rule at 10k, a soft rule at 5k, but sometimes, no matter what you do, you just can't get it to that.

15k is fair in my opinion. I'd only really seriously stress out at over 20k for any specific image, unless it was full-screen.

A simple way to reduce image size: Save it in various GIF formats. Sometimes 64 colour depth is fine, and can be a substantial reduction in size from the standard 256 or 128 colours. (I've even gone down to 32 colours on a couple of occasions)

I thought 15k would be ok. The reason I asked was because I was over at CSS Zen Garden browsing as I like to do. I saw some extremely FAT images as backgrounds. I saw some that were over 40k. Seems like a lot to me, but I guess those sites are sorta just for looks and not performance.

you have to figure that the image size really doesn't matter anymore, as most people are on broadband

Jaison I disagree. Many people still connect over dial up. And even if everyone was on a high speed connection we'll always want sites to load faster. I don't think we'll be happy until a site completely loads before we finishing clicking a link.

Tom whether the 15k is too much depends on the rest of the page and how many images, etc you've used. If that 15k image is the only one then I'd say it's fine. If you have 5 other images each at 5k then it might be too much.

It also depends on the purpose of the page. There are some pages people are willing to wait longer to get the info. If you click a thumbnail for example to open a full size image you expect it might take some time to download, but you'll wait since you asked for the image.

My general rule is to try to make things as fast as possible. If I could get that 15k image down to 12k I would. If I could get it down to 7k I would do that too.

Here's a good site you can use to test the speed of your pages.

Thanks for the replies. I will definitely see if I can trim the size down some.

Tom think if the size in terms of the whole page though. If the only thing on the page is that one image it's still going to load fast. I realize there's more that will be on the page, but you get the idea.