Shadowbend Studios Wednesday Wisdom – Compress Your Images
Good morning and happy Wednesday everyone. This week’s bit of Wednesday Wisdom is about compressing the image files that you plan to use for your website to help keep your site load speeds fast and effective!
Nearly every website contains media files: pdfs, videos, photos etc. and an often overlooked aspect of web design and development is image compression. Websites like MachMetrics monitor site loading speeds and mention that the optimal time for a site to load is 3 seconds or less. I checked the Shadowbend Studios website on Pingdom and found that it loads in 2.97 seconds!
Why is this important?
Your website load speed is important for a few reasons. First of all your visitors attention spans are getting shorter every day. You want you site to load quickly so that your visitors can begin enjoying your site right away. Slow loading speeds can also trigger server time outs which will cause your site to lag or stop loading completely.
Compressing your images is one of the easiest and most effective way of speeding up your website load times. Websites rarely need an image file with a resolution larger than 72 or 96dpi and I try to keep most of my images under 1900 pixels wide. This helps to keep your file sizes under 100-200kb. There are many ways you can achieve image compression. There are WordPress plugins like Optimole, Imagify and Smush and you can always utilize software like Photoshop to get your images the right size before you even upload them to your site. On a side note, if you do compress your images before uploading them, always make sure to save a copy of the original (pre-compressed) image.
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