What Really Happens When You Save an Image on Your Website

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If you have been paying attention lately here on WA, website speed is extremely important for a better User Experience, UX. It is well known that when you have a better UX, you are improving your website SEO and thus giving a boost to your rankings.

A PROBLEM YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT

One of the biggest problems for website speed is having too many images on your website, whether they are optimized or not. But you can do something about that, and I am not talking about optimization. I am talking about stopping the saving of unused images on your website’s media library.

I just created a training tutorial explaining how to correct this problem but I think many people thought I was talking about image optimization. I definitely was not talking about that. Let me give you a visual example of what happens when you upload an image on your website by using the 4 images below.

NOTE, These first two images may be difficult to see the differences because of their sizes and how they are portrayed here in this blog.

Let us say that the above image at a size of 1200 x 812 pixels, is the image you decide to upload and save on your website.


But did you know that once you save that first full size image on your website, WordPress is also saving the above image at the size of 1024 x 1024 pixels in your website’s media library too?


And guess what? WordPress is also saving the above image at 300 x 300 pixels and the below image at 150 x 150 pixels. You are only going to use one of those 4 sizes, so those remaining 3 images are taking up space in your media library and helping to slow down your overall website performance.


THERE IS AN EASY WAY TO STOP THIS FROM HAPPENING

If you were to go into your website’s media library and count the amount of images, the number you get is not the actual amount. Let us say you count 50 images in the media library. Now multiply that number by 4 and 200 images is a more accurate amount that is in your media library.

This happens because WordPress will always save 2 or 3 duplicate copies of your original uploaded image. But like I explain in my training at the link below, there is a really easy fix that you can do to stop these extra unused images from being saved on your website and contributing to its slower performance.

Stop WordPress From Saving Too Many Images on Your Website

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Recent Comments

75

Thanks Robert, didn't know this one at all.

You are welcome. I just learned about this last week.

Good reminders Robert, thank you!

You are welcome Bob.

Thank you. I am just having problems with my header images, which don't appear.

Depending on the problems you are having with your header images, you may have to go into your website's customization area to make changes.

Maybe you can answer this question for me Boomer. After extensive research I have found that site speed sites .... several of them ... not just Google site speed, are giving me photo optimization errors. These only come when I place images that I made with canva and it is only when I use them as Featured images only.
I have tried several compression addons, resizing to the smallest and junkiest file possible, change media thumbnail settings and nothing seems to satisfy these errors. Maybe I am just obsessing over this but I can't seem to find a solution.

What kind of errors are you getting? I have never used Canva so I do not know if there is something specific about them that site speed would not like.

The errors are that my photos are either too large or need compressed but I have decreased the size as small as WordPress will allow which is 200px x 200px and I have used several compression tools but nothing satisfies any of the site speed sites. I tried three of the top sites for checking site speed.
It's also just the featured images too which is weird. I can have an extremely large photo made with canva right in the blog post and no errors occur but as soon as I use one as a featured image the error comes back. It's really frustrating lol.

It could be theme related because some themes create their own sizes for the featured images, whereas WordPress handles the image sizes for inside your content.

Perhaps Canva has some sort of editing code embedded in the image and your theme doesn't comply with it. Have you tried making images at BeFunky.com This is where I sometimes make my featured images.

Hi, Robert...

One thing that always has confused me is why having too many images stored slows down the website...I hear this a lot and I will have a look at the tutorial you refer to so I can reduce the images stored because I hate clutter...

I also know it is more work to optimize images that are not going to be used, so better to get rid of them...That makes sense to me. Also if you are using a paid service plugin it can save money - I like that...

Once the image is selected that you will use for your post or page, I would think that the rest (i.e. the number of images in total you have) has nothing more to do with site speed?

Having said that, we use AWS S3, CDN, and etc. to enhance load time speeds, and the images are stored in buckets that are used for product pages...

I would be interested to know your take on this, it is something that has bugged me for a while!

Cheers!
Dave : )

Let me put it this way Dave. Do you think a website that has 100 optimized images would perform a little bit faster than a website with 300 to 400 optimized images?

The point I am making here and in my training tutorial is that WordPress will always save 2 or 3 copies on your website for every image you upload.

That means if you have uploaded 100 images to your website, you actually have 300 to 400 images saved in your website's media library.

The more images you have to optimize the slower your website. But by making the simple change to your media library settings, as described in my tutorial, you can stop the duplications from occurring.

I'd rather erase them all because I have already used it.

You cannot really erase them unless you change your media library settings first.

I never knew that! I thought speed was only directly related to image optimization. Thanks for your post, Robert.

Website speed is related to image optimization. But if you have to optimize more images than what you are actually using, those unused images are taking up memory space on your website.

The point is, if you upload 1 image to your website then you should expect only 1 image to be saved. But WordPress is actually saving an additional 2 or 3 copies of that same image.

Now if you have to optimize 4 images instead of just 1, you are wasting memory space on your website by optimizing copies of your image that you will never use.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, Robert. I've made it a point to follow your training, and just make sure that only one image is saved.

James

Good post, Rob. Because I use a lot of images, I have made it a practice to minimize my uploads by identifying the pics I want to use BEFORE I upload a post.

I still may have to make a choice between several pics for a certain section but, as I make my final decision when positioning the pics in my draft, I immediately delete any unwanted pics.

It keeps me from getting a lot of unused pics cluttering up my online media storage.

Jim

I do the same thing too Jim. But with every image that you do decide to use on your website, WordPress is automatically saving 2 or 3 duplicate copies of that one image.

Unless you make that simple change to your media library settings, these duplicate copies will continue to be saved in your media library without you even knowing it.

Looks like I need to do a little work then!

:-)

Jim

There is no pressing need to go back and change all of the images you have already uploaded. That could take a lot of time and effort. The best thing to do is make the simple Media Library Settings change for all uploaded images moving forward.

I agree.

Moving forward, I have already zero-ed out my Media Library settings as you suggested. We'll just see what happens before I go back and systematically start changing images I have already uploaded.

Jim

Great information. It is important to jettison every pixel you don't need Robert!

Yes it is Michael. The less we have the more speed we could gain.

And here I thought Wordpress was responsive to the size! I had no idea that WP saved several sizes! Thanks, Robert! Heading over to check out your training now! Alanna

You are welcome Alanna. I just recently learned about this myself and was quite shocked at how simple the solution was to stopping this.

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