Think about it. You join a forum because you found a link to it through a Google search. Unless you can't see anything at all, do you join right away? Or do you look through it to see if maybe it offers the info that you want and if the members are decent or smart asses to outsiders. I haunt a site for a while before I join. And how far back is a noobie going to go? A month or two, maybe. The videos in Premium are a different story. A haunter never knows about it to begin with.
Save all that site loading time by doing the compression and leaving current posts/pic&vids up.
I don't know what I'm talking about on the technical level, I'm looking at it on the mechanical level. More square footage to a house takes longer to build it. More data to load takes longer. The site took 42 seconds to load from the time I clicked my shortcut. The web was already open to the home page. In this case, Bing. Then I click the topic that I know is new and it loads in a second. Within that topic, I pic the thread, click it and it takes 20-30 seconds to load.
I only use 1 tab at a time, so it isn't a multiple tab issue. I'm still going round and round with my host because they keep blocking my IP or the VPN it's attached to. They tell me it's I have too many tabs open and another one tells me my connection is slow and still another has another reason and I just send them screen shots of my info and they get lost. Whatever. It's dinner time for me!