Is it okay to have 300 large images on the home page of a website?
I'm developing an e-commerce site and there are about 200-500 products available for sale. We want to show a 100KB .jpg for each product on the home page. So the home page would essentially load 200-500 images that are each 100KB.
Doesn't that amount to a 20-50MB page load which is really bad?
My main concern is that the search engines will penalize us and we will never be able to get on the first page of the search results. Is this true?
And the other main concern is that we are forcing users to download 20-50MB of content...which sounds pretty bad.
If this is as bad as I think it is, then is there any way to keep all 200-500 images on the home page without using pagination? What would you recommend?