Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images

It is widely known that the loading time of websites has a major influence on the overall user experience. If on the age of 56K Modems people would be willing to wait even half a minute for a website to load this time span has been drastically reduced lately. The are market researches, in fact, confirming that users will just skip a site altogether if it fails to load within 4 seconds.

The first part of the “Speed Up Your Site” series will cover how to optimize images. Images can create an extra load on the size of your pages, specially if you forget to optimize them. Photoshop and similar image editing software include a feature called “Save for the web”. Always use this feature since it will reduce the image size and load time substantially.

If you do not use an image editing software or if you want something more practical you can use this online image optimizer from Dynamic Drive. It will automatically optimize gif, png and jpeg images, and it will also convert file formats if needed.

Speed Up Your Site Series:

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Daniel Scocco on March 8, 2007 | Filed Under Blog Design

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32 Responses to “Speed Up Your Site: Optimize Images”

Madhur Kapoor on March 8th, 2007 6:05 am

Nice tip Daniel , generally i prefer thumbnails on my site with a link to actual image . But whenever i use a larger image i use photoshop for optimization .
Mike Panic on March 8th, 2007 7:38 am

For non blog sites, slicing larger graphics up in Photoshop can also help load times for sites.
engtech on March 8th, 2007 8:12 am

I was going to write about this today

Coding Horror has been running a series on the same subject this week.

http://www.codinghorror.com/bl.....00807.html
Edward on March 8th, 2007 9:09 am

My blog needs around 10 seconds to load the whole page , hope that after using this it can be load faster !
Edward Wolf on March 8th, 2007 10:24 am

Great tip. Thanks.
Bes Z on March 8th, 2007 10:42 am

Good tip Daniel. Many times bloggers find that people are not visiting their sites regularly because of the long wait for the images to download. Sometimes many people simply opt for an image-free interface. That is good too. However, if one has smaller sized images [space usage, not dimensions] that blend well into a site, there is no reason not to have too many images around the site that do not confuse people.

Here is a site to help check the loading size of a page to figure out whether or not you need to optimize your images:

http://www.websiteoptimization.....s/analyze/

Good luck!
StatMan on March 8th, 2007 11:33 am

Thanks for the tip about the online image optimizer. I don’t have Photoshop, although it sounds more and more like I should. In the meantime, the online image optimizer will be very helpful. Thanks again.
Daniel on March 8th, 2007 2:14 pm

Oh yeah I forgot to mention the article I did about loading time of pages, I will add it to the post now.
Vatu on March 9th, 2007 8:21 am

Nice Tips

THanks
website-control SEO on November 30th, 2007 4:04 am

Great tips of Optimize Images,

The Best method to decrease file size for a WEB image is to decrease the quality. This does NOT mean the image will not look good on a computer monitor. Digitized images are normally at a much higher quality (resolution / dots per inch) than a monitor can display. This step alone will normally reduce the file size to 1/5 of the original. Physical size will not change (Avoid resize until final step)

I hope, it will help to all webmasters.

Thanks