Intro to Web Page Image Optimization

🏞 Hello! So, do you like a website that loads slowly? One that you have to 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 a bunch of text-based paragraphs? 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 but not bloating your web page and increasing the load time? That’s where Image Optimization comes in. To understand the importance of this, let’s think of a photo straight off your digital camera. Maybe this is your smartphone. How many Megabytes would you say a standard smartphone image is? … Between 2 and 4 Megabytes would be a good estimate. If we multiply that by 5 images, that’s about 15 Megabytes. 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 your data, and multiple people on a website simultaneously could overload your server.

4 Steps to Optimize Your Web Page Images

⭐️ So how do we avoid those problems? How do you optimize your website’s images? Let’s break this down to 4 quick, actionable tips:

1. Resize your image down. High-definition photos off your camera are huge. You’ll want to shrink it down to the size it will be displayed on the web page.
2. Convert your image to a Web-ready format like JPG or WebP.
3. In your image software (like Photoshop), when you save as a JPG, you have a scale of 1 to 12 for image quality. For the Web, let’s shoot for around 5 or 6.
4. After you’ve saved your image, run it through a compression tool like ImageOptim.com or TinyJPG.com. This will keep the photo quality the same but shrink the file size a little bit. Plus it only takes like 5 seconds.

👍🏼 And that’s it! Once you do those steps, your image is optimized and ready for uploading to your website! Do this for every image, before uploading, and you’ll keep your website’s page size and load time as fast 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.