Goal
- Decrease the amount of data to download.
- Improve page display speed.
- Decrease the energy impact related to the consultation of the site.
Implementation
For image preview vignettes, use specific versions of them and not original images resized using their HTML attributes or CSS properties.
Control
For all HTML images present in the source code or generated via javascript:
- Check that they do not have CSS
height
orwidth
properties which modify the apparent size of the images in relation to their actual dimensions.To do this, use "deactivate all CSS styles" using a web development tool to find images whose dimensions change after deactivating CSS styles. - Also check that the dimensions indicated in the
width
andheight
attributes of the generated HTML code correspond to the actual dimensions of the image using a development tool.
For example, the following will be invalidated:
- An image of the type <img height="300" width="600" class="thumb"/> if the
.thumb
class imposes the CSS propertiesheight: 100px
andwidth: auto
. - An image of the type <img height="100" width="200"/> if the actual dimensions of the image are 300px high and 600px wide.
Overview and background
The 240 Opquast rules are defined and agreed upon by an extensive community of web professionals and academics. These web quality assurance guidance rules started as a list of best practices 20 years ago. They have since been revised every five years and have been tried and tested via millions of web interactions by Opquast community’s customers, including the leading CMS communities which have developed plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. The most recent version, v4, was established in 2020.
Each rule has individual technical sheets and the rules can be searched by project phase or various topics: e-commerce, data-privacy, internationalization, security, code, etc, or by themes: accessibility, SEO, mobile, privacy, and ecodesign. The complete checklist is available on a creative commons license BY-SA.
To learn more about the Opquast approach, read this article published at Smashing Magazine
Broad application and benefits
The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.

Discover Opquast training and certification
The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.
Opquast training has already allowed over 17,000 web professionals to have their skills certified. Train your teams, contact us
We offer a 1 hour free discovery module.