This Can Hurt Your Site BIG Time
We all know that the load time of your website is critical.
If your site loads to slow people are impatient and will simply go find another site. So you want to make sure you create a great user experience for your visitors.
Not only that, load times are an important factor when it comes to search engine rankings.
One of the biggest culprits of a site loading slow are big image files.
Remember every second counts and the faster your site loads the better. And as of April 21st 2015 that has become even more important because of the mobile friendly update Google has done.
More and more people are using mobile devices so you really need to be on task when it comes to your images.
I took a screenshot from a site I frequent KISSmetrics and there are some pretty interesting facts about site speed when it comes to mobile and what mobile users have encountered.
So What Can You Do?
Before you upload ANY images to your website you need to compress the file. You'll find most files will be compressed by over 80%. This is huge and will speed up your site big time.
In fact if you did a mobile test on your site one of the most common errors is that image files have not been compressed.
Here's 3 free online resources where you can compress your image files, I'm sure there is more, but these will cover all the bases for you:
http://compresspng.com/ - I use this one all the time as all my images are in a PNG format. It also can do JPEG.
http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx - you can compress any image and you can even down load this onto computer.
http://jpeg-optimizer.com/ - Here's one spcifically for JPEG..
Hope you found this helpful
I believe in you
Leo
Recent Comments
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Great insight and a point that cannot possibly be stressed enough. I am working on some things to dramatically improve the load times and overall performance of one of my sites, myself. I can't tell you how many times I have seen people with great sites, including some members here, but that take far too long to load and results in a ton of lost traffic and efforts.
Google ABSOLUTELY factors speed and load times into their rankings and with the additional weight of importance they are putting on having a responsive site, your mobile load times are equally important and should be monitored, as well. As always, great post, my friend!
Good info. however I am surprised even baffled that a PNG image would compress even 50%. Bitmaps are the absolute worst and they can easily compressed 80%. JPG or jpeg also compressed greatly.
Thanks for sharing. Also you can test the speed of your site at gtmetric.com, it's free to set up an account.
You're welcome and thanks for that link.
Google also has one for testing your site speed spcifically for the mobile update https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
Thank you, Leo! I have been thinking about this lately.. all page speed tests I've run have a hissy about the size of my images and I need to fix it. Your post couldn't have come at a better time. I'm getting on it this weekend!
C
Hey Leo, another question for you... I have plumbed for using http://jpeg-optimizer.com/ as I have to use jpg images for my RSS feed... so, can you recommend a compression level to use, or should I just play around with it and see what works? It's pre-set at 65 (out of 1-99)...
C
There is no best setting for jpeg - 40 to 60 is a good range but it does depend on the image, some images may need to be higher. So yes play around
Thanks for the quick reply!
I've managed to reduce by around 60%, going from 80kb to 30kb.. so my images were never really that big in the first place.. but every little helps, I guess :)
This might turn into a Friday job rather than a weekend one. I just want to get it done now.. Lol!
C
Hi Leo, thanks. I have a lot of images (the site about mountains) but did not compress them so far. Instead I am careful to keep them around or below 200 kB. I plan to compress new ones from now on.
But how about existing ones, they are already uploaded, is there anything I can do with them now? Thanks. Jovo
You can compress them an reupload them - a file that's around 200kb can be compressed up to 90% so that's a huge difference.
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Great tips. Been on my todo list for some time now, so in the middle of making some adjustments these days, so I welcome all tips like the ones you just gave here. Thank you.
You're welcome