XF 2.2 Images on the site or forum

[Ricsca]

I use various images uploaded to a folder on the site and not uploaded via the forum.
Is there a performance difference?
Thanks

 

[Jeremy P]

Any files you upload to your server are served by your web server, which is almost certainly faster than attachments as those must go through XF/PHP.

If you mean using the asset uploader in the control panel, those are also served directly by your web server so there will be no discernible difference.

 

[Ricsca]

I'm not referring to the loading speed, but rather the fact that images uploaded to the forum (attachments) aren't indexed by Google because they don't have a path like images.
I imported a very large forum that was in phpbb2 and bbpress, so now all the images are between the

[img]...[/img]

tags. I thought about converting them to attachments, but if I convert them, I'll lose all image indexing on Google because Google no longer reads them as images.

 

[Jeremy P]

the fact that images uploaded to the forum (attachments) aren't indexed by Google because they don't have a path like images

As I pointed out in the other thread, that's simply untrue:

XF 2.2 Post in thread 'Image Indexing and SEO'

Friday at 1:36 AM

You've posted the URL, Google has no issue crawling or indexing them if it's deemed worthy. Google (and browsers in general) use the Content-Type header and other context clues to determine the resource type, regardless of the file extension in the URL itself (or lack thereof). In the same way Google knows the URL to a thread is HTML, it can reliably determine the URL to image attachments are images.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:xenforo.com&udm=2

• Jeremy P

I thought about converting them to attachments

You'd want to set up redirects for SEO when changing the URI of any resource, and, even if you did that, the attachments would still be served a bit slower since they have to go through PHP. There isn't likely to be a huge SEO difference in either case unless the images are very heavy.

 

[Ricsca]

When I search Google images, I always get "correct" images with jpg, png, and folder extensions.
I've never seen images with strange URLs...
Then, obviously, if I search for images from a specific site using site:mysite.it, it's normal for something to come up, but still very little.
Google indexes images based on various values, but especially based on the extension.
For example, for a few years now, it has been rewarding the webp images you've implemented, but if the images uploaded to the forum are converted to webp, they become

https://xenforo.com/community/attachments/cane-che-cioca-palla-webp.324565/

Instead of

https://xenforo.com/community/attachments/cane-che-cioca-palla-webp

Won't the image become something else?