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A GIF that lasts only a few seconds can be several megabytes in size, which means that visitors with slower internet connections could be looking at a blank page for a few seconds before it loads.

Even if you're happy with how your website is performing, you may not realize how much weight your GIFs are adding to each page. That said, just because GIFs are easy to use doesn't make them ideal for websites. Although we now have several superior alternatives for displaying animations, people are comfortable with GIF, and GIF animations are still extremely easy to make. It was never meant to be an animation tool, yet people have been using it for that purpose for the past three decades. GIFs were invented in 1987 as a way to transmit multiple images that share the same metadata in a single file. Let's cover some ways to speed up GIF animations on your website and look at some alternative formats that you should consider. That said, GIFs can drag down a web page's performance, especially if not optimized. Thanks to their simplicity and widespread support, GIF files remain wildly popular despite the dozens of other image and video formats available today.

The graphics interchange format, better known as GIF, has been around for longer than the World Wide Web itself.

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