Posts Tagged ‘Optimizing Images’

Optimizing Images To Reduce Load Time

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Images are an integral part of a website.

They are often used to catch the imagination of the person giving a pictorial description about the content being presented. However, adding images to your website leads to a different set of problems. The image files are heavy and it can be a major hindrance for slow dial up connections. It is necessary that your images be optimized, so that your site load quickly and does not lead to the visitors losing interest in it.

You can use various image editing software to remove the unnecessary part of the information of your image. This helps reduce size of the file to a large extent without affecting the overall appearance of the image. One of the useful tools is Photoshop, which allows you to save an image as a JPEG file. It provides an option for you to choose the quality of the JPEG image, which you may preferably set to 8 to10 that will allow the quality of your image to be saved, but at a small file size. You may use “save for web” feature from Photoshop or use the Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S option after opening an image and open the format that you want to save the image in. There are other free image compressor tools available online that you can download and use to reduce the image file’s size.

There are other ways as well, which you may use to reduce the file size. Very often people use the option to scale the images. However, it is not useful for reducing the load time. It can be better to resize the image, which helps reduce the file size. If you are using the JPG format, you may set the quality of the image as 50 for optimal results and also make the image progressive, so that visitors get to look at some part of it, while it is still loading.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

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Optimizing Images To Reduce Load Time 2

Monday, October 6th, 2008

If you want to use the GIF format, reduce the maximum number of colors and make the image interlaced, which acts like the progressive option for JPG files. You may also use the height and width tags, when you place images. If you don’t, then the browser has to determine the size of the image, before loading the image.

It may not load the rest of the page, unless all images are loaded. This means that the visitor, who is there to check out the content has to wait for the image to load, which can simply be very annoying. By setting the height and width tags, as the browser knows the size, other part will be loaded even before your image is loaded. PNG color format may also be used. It supports 24 bit color and has better transparency than the GIF format. However, PNG format is not supported by all browsers due to which GIF format is preferred.

Furthermore, you can put keywords in all the text, around the image, image name, page title, which is better for optimization. You may even find it useful to enable image search option at Google webmaster tool.

Keep in mind that images may not be the first things that the visitors see, but they are very useful to keep them on the website. So use only a small amount of them, so that your visitors are not left infuriated by huge amount of loading time it takes. Optimizing images can also be fun.

Peter Brittain
Slinky Internet Marketing

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Posted in Optimizing Images | No Comments »


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