Background Image Loading

Hello!

We're in the process of redeveloping our home page which uses a css-based graphical slideshow. All images for a particular section are loaded in the background- around 300k or so total size. Will this penalize our ranking in any way? Should we load the images on-demand instead- when the user performs a certain action?

Thanks for any insight!

It has no effect on search engine rankings. If you let the images to be crawled by Image bots and the image names are sensible - describing the image, you will have no issues.

If you are redeveloping your home page with such a heavy graphical slideshow, I hope you will not get penalize but your ranking may effect in some way on Google as it likes simple text to rank the page (with lower size pages containing relevant and quality content). You can try the ways suggested by Prowler for Image Search.

The other option of loading the images on-demand, is much better