Reduce Your Image Sizes by up to 200%!

Images with a big file size are the most common reason for a slow website. There are many ways to reduce the file size of your images. If you use Canva for making images to your website, there's a simple trick to reduce the file size of your Canva images by up to 200%.

Before we go into that, I'll remind you that there is a free image optimization plugin available for all Wealthy Affiliate members; the Kraken.io image compression plugin.

Even if you have an older website, the premium membership on Kraken.io is included in your WA membership! However, for an older website, you need to upload the plugin and register for Kraken. When you have uploaded the plugin, you need to contact WA Site Support and ask for them to upgrade you to premium.

Fleeky has made a good tutorial on how to setup Kraken plugin on your website, so I recommend that one for detailed instructions:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/how-to-install-and-use-the-kraken-plugin

So, Kraken compresses new images you upload on your site. Your old images won't be compressed automatically when you upload Kraken plugin, so you need to compress them manually.

The Kraken plugin helps, but you should compress your images already before uploading them to your site.

Do You Make Images for Your Site on Canva? This Simple Trick Reduces the File Size by up to 200%

I use Canva for making many of the images on my website, and for making all featured images on my site. The file size of the featured images is especially important, because they are large images anyway.

I noticed I had made a mistake with my Canva images, which made them huge. When you download an image to your computer from Canva, you can choose the file type, and the image quality, if you download your image in jpg.

The quality is 80% by default, but at some point I thought, "hey, I'll download my image with 100% quality, the better quality the better image, right?".

Well, that was the mistake. I just had a look at some images I had uploaded to my website. Some of them were even bigger than 1MB, which is a huge file size!

Even if you use Kraken for image compression, an image this big is huge even after compression, and slows down your site for sure.

There was one featured image on my site that was 872kt (which is huge too). I tried downloading the same image again from Canva, but this time with the default 80% image quality. Now the image size was only 148kt!

So, the image size reduced by around 170% even before image optimization.

So, this is the simple trick; when you download jpg images to your computer from Canva, set the image quality to 80% (you don't actually need to set it, because that's the default setting). There's no much difference in quality compared to 100% image quality, but the difference in file size is HUGE.

If you have huge images on your website, the best thing to do is just upload them again with a smaller file size, and remove the old ones from your site. It takes time, but it's worth it. You won't believe how much images with a huge file size slow down your website!

This trick is mostly for Canva images, but you should pay attention to the file sizes of other images too.

If you take your own images with the camera on your smart phone and use them on your website, you should reduce their file size before you upload them to your website. The images taken with a phone of your camera have a huge file size, it can be many megabits (MB).

I don't honestly know how to reduce image size on phone, but on desktop (PC) you can do that using Windows tools. Just right click an image, and you'll see an option "change size" or something like that.

If you have any additional tips how to reduce image sizes or how to improve website speed, please let me know in the comment section below!