Part of the Website Ownership Tips video series.
Intro to web page image optimization
Hello! Do you like a website that loads slowly, where you wait for every individual image to pop up? Nobody likes that! That’s why today’s tip is about image optimization. Aside from the hosting server and videos, images are some of the biggest contributors to your page’s load time.
But we love images, right? Do you enjoy reading content that’s only paragraphs of text? No. Images add beauty and visual appeal to your content.
So here’s the big question: how do you strike the balance between adding appealing images and not bloating your web page? That’s where image optimization comes in. Think of a photo straight off your digital camera, maybe your smartphone. How many megabytes is a standard smartphone image? Between 2 and 4 MB is a good estimate. Multiply that by 5 images and you’re around 15 MB. Okay for storage space, but astronomically high for your website! That could take several seconds to load on a smartphone with poor cell service, it eats up data, and multiple people on your website at once could overload your server.
4 steps to optimize your web page images
So how do you optimize your website’s images? Here are 4 quick, actionable tips:
- Resize your image down. High-definition photos off your camera are huge. Shrink each one to the size it will be displayed on the web page.
- Convert it to a web-ready format like JPG or WebP.
- Choose a lower quality setting. In image software like Photoshop, saving as JPG gives you a 1–12 quality scale. For the web, shoot for around 5 or 6.
- Compress it. Run the saved image through a compression tool like ImageOptim.com or TinyJPG.com. This keeps the photo quality the same but shrinks the file size, and it only takes about 5 seconds.
That’s it! Do this for every image before uploading, and you’ll keep your website’s page size and load time as low as possible.
And if this is too much effort and you want to hand these tasks to your webmaster, I’m happy to do this for my clients. Just contact me if you’d like to work together on your website. Either way, thank you for tuning in to today’s Website Ownership Tip.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
