The Best Practices for Making Web-Ready Images by using image compressor.
Doesn’t everyone enjoy looking at pictures?
They have the power to make even the most boring text exciting to read. Blog posts with accompanying images are more engaging, get shared more often, and establish a site’s overall tone and brand.
Actually, though, Humans have an innate reaction to visual stimuli. For this reason, it is important to use visuals in your blog promotion.
However, images can make up half or more of your page size if you aren’t careful. A web page today typically weighs in at around 700K in size, down significantly from its peak just a few years ago. The current norm is 2MB, and it continues to rise every year.
The Importance of Image Optimization.
The last thing you want is for potential visitors to give up on your website before it even loads after you’ve put in hours of work creating stellar content, promoting your blog, and networking with other bloggers.
Studies show that if a site takes longer than three seconds to load, up to 40 percent of visitors will leave.
Concepts Fundamental to Enhancing Images.
There are several factors to consider when optimizing images for your blog, including file type, image size and dimensions, image serving method, and image compression.
Let’s investigate these points in detail.
Form of the Document.
PNG and JPEG are the most common formats for web images, while GIF is used for animation. Who doesn’t enjoy the many hilarious GIFs that can be found on the internet today?
While either format will work fine for displaying on a visitor’s browser, following these guidelines will ensure the highest quality and most efficient use of your images.
Images with people, places, or things should be saved as JPEGs.
PNG is ideal for images with transparent backgrounds, such as graphics and logos, as well as designs that rely heavily on text.
If animation is required, use GIF; otherwise, PNG is preferred.
Compressing an Image
In order to optimize your images, nothing beats using state-of-the-art lossy image compression to minimize file size.
Since lossy JPEG compression offers the greatest savings in terms of file size, it is the format used by most image editing programs like Viseme and Photoshop when saving files. Lossy image compression, while resulting in a slight decrease in image quality, does allow for previously unmanageable file sizes to be brought down to something more suitable for the web.
Here are some programs, both free and paid, that can help you reduce the file size of your images so that they are suitable for use on the web.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and other online applications
JPEG Compressor
The jpeg compressor (it optimizes JPEG files too despite the name) is a web app that lets you optimize up to 20 images of 5MB or less at once, making it a great choice if you’re looking for a high-quality online image compression tool.
Additionally, they provide a developer API and a WordPress plugin that can instantly optimize your uploaded images.
Now while it may sound like a lot, unlimited images per month isn’t that much when you consider that WordPress typically generates three to five variations of each image in different sizes. Good news: the cost per image is reasonable.
EWWW Image Optimizer
The free EWWW Image Optimizer plugin for WordPress can automatically optimize your uploaded images if you’re not ready to spend money and don’t want to bother optimizing them manually.
The free version only offers lossless compression, so the savings aren’t nearly as great as with the premium subscription, which also offers lossy compression. Still, it’s preferable to doing nothing and will save you some time.
conclusion
With some predicting that webpage sizes will average near 3MB by 2017, now is the time to begin optimizing your images.
Keep in mind that not all of your visitors will be using high-speed connections, and that Google’s ranking may be negatively impacted by excessive page weight and slow page loading times. Get in the habit of optimizing your images right now to help lighten your load.