A key part of improving your websites performance is reducing the time it takes to load the website; your website will load in several stages and there are different improvements that can be made for these different stages. If you don’t have backend access or aren’t very technical, one of the easiest areas you can effect is the images. Ensuring your images aren’t negatively impacting the performance of your website can be something that is easy to overlook and overtime, when you upload new images, the impact will be greater.
Images are roughly 60% of all web traffic. However, unless thought of ahead of time, often images are not optimised. Anyone familiar with Photoshop or any image editing software will know about images not being correctly optimised. Images may have metadata, potentially aren’t compressed properly, and could even be a “wrong” file type. A good general rule is to look over your images and cut them down to size! You can do this by reducing the image size, compress them down and changing their file type to a more modern and web friendly file type.
Reducing Website Image Size
There are a lot of good options for image reduction tools, some of which are free online! Tools like tinyPNG and tinyJPG are great ways of compressing your images and taking off any redundant extra file size (providing they are PNGs and JPGs). If you’re a bit more confident, Photoshop or any image editing software will give you a bit more control and perhaps reduce the images down even further. Compressing, cropping and even slightly reducing the quality of the image could make the difference to reducing images to their best performance.
Though JPG, PNG and GIF are the most popular types of images (and you have probably seen these yourself) they aren’t the most modern. Google started web based image types; webP. This newer format is meant to take the place of every format and it becomes the universal standard. It’s more efficient and smaller than the other formats but still keeps all the features that they have too. Despite it working better than the older formats, it isn’t universally support and it’s not wise to opt for it over the other formats until it is.
Get In Touch
Image optimisation can be a very useful tool to use to improve the performance of your website, especially for mobile devices and image heavy websites. Remember to review your images, know what file type they are and correct them if needed, compress them and reduce them down to a size that makes the most sense for their usage, and double check that everything is looking perfect once you’re done.
If you want to know more about optimising your images or want us to take a look at your website for you, get in touch with our team today. And don’t forget to check out our blogs for more pieces of advice and more information.