Why is the live preview loading slowly?

If you're using WooCommerce Product Options with the Live Preview add-on then customers can view a preview of their customized product in a lightbox.

We have optimized the live preview for fast performance as follows:

The image is displayed client-side to the customer before it is returned from the server where it will eventually be stored.
A built-in caching mechanism prevents images that have already been rendered from being rendered again.
The canvas is upscaled and the result is resampled for the purpose of the live preview. This improves the appearance of the preview image, while trying to balance quality with speed. We have provided a developer filter allowing you to reduce the quality further, but you should test carefully this could result in the image previews looking pixellated - especially for images with transparent backgrounds.

If you find that the lightbox takes too long to open, then that could be because of the following:

Large image size - The load time depends largely on the size of (a) the product image and (b) the customer's uploaded image. As store owner, you should reduce and optimize product images before adding them to your site. You can also encourage customers to upload smaller images, for example by setting a maximum size on the file upload field.
Hosting speed - The faster your web host, the faster the image preview will take to load. If your hosting is slow then we recommend a high quality managed host like Kinsta, which we use for the Barn2 site.
The customer's internet speed - The image preview is loaded client-side, which means that the speed could also be affected by the resources available to the visitors' device. There's nothing you can do about this as store owner, but just bear in mind that the speed in your own testing may be different from the speed that your customers experience.

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