Author TonyMonzon
2014
5
Premium
Rank 1531

Is your website slow? does it take for ever to open a page? Optimizing your images will increase website server performance, web page loads, and speed up your overall website.

Gimp is a free image editor where you can enhance images for your website. In this tutorial I will show you how to optimize images for your website. So why optimize images?

Reducing Server Load: When you upload files into your WordPress site you are transferring data to the hosting server. If you upload huge image files, this can slow down the server that's hosting your website. By optimizing your images you can upload tons of images without affecting your server's performance.

Minimize Web Page Load: Have you seen websites where it takes a few seconds to load an entire page? This is because the website has many items like images that need to be uploaded all at once. If the website's images are large, it' going to take some time before all images are visible. In order to reduce the time it takes to load a website page, you need to reduce the size of the image.

Speed Up your overall Website: By optimizing all of your website's images, your entire website's performance will increase. Imagine your website being one gigantic image; if your image's size is one gigabyte and your competition's image size is five hundred megabytes, who's website is faster? Your competitors website will attract more viewers because it's lighter, faster and it delivers lighting fast content. So if you're excited like I am, let's begin optimizing our images.

Before you continue, view the video so that the following information makes sense.

Here are the key elements that are important when optimizing your images with Gimp.

Flatten Image: The flatten image option compresses the image's layers into one layer. Some higher quality images are made up of multiple layers to make the image more detailed and vibrant. Basically the flatten image option reduces all the layers into one light weight layer; therefore, reducing the image's size.

The Quality Slider: When you reduce the image's quality you also reduce the size of the image. The problem with this is that your image may look jagged or with rough edges around the image. This is entirely your choice, you can always increase the quality but you will have to deal with the image's size.

I personally position the quality slider all the way down to 25. This is the best setting for my images that I display on my website. My largest images are 700x700 and they still keep most of their quality with this setting. If you have larger images, you may have to increase the quality slider to 30 or above.

The Smoothing Slider: The smoothing slider will smooth or blend the color in your images so they appear more natural. This option will also reduce broken or jagged sections in your image. I recommend applying this setting to the maximum to get the best results.

After optimizing the images on your website, let me know how much it has improved. Thanks for Reading!

-Tony-

Join the Discussion
Write something…
Recent messages
NnurseBecca Premium
Thank you, I want to try it but watch this a couple times more first
Reply
TonyMonzon Premium
hi NnurseBecca,
I'm glad you enjoyed it. A second time is always a charm.;0)
Have a nice day.
Reply
GemKnight Premium
I use GIMP a lot for my site's custom images
Reply
TonyMonzon Premium
Gimp is an awesome and also powerful image editor that I use for all my images on my website. Thanks for you comment.;0)
Reply
TonyMonzon Premium
anytime fmusiol ;0)
Reply
fmusiol Premium
Thanks for sharing
Reply
Top