Boosting Your Website Speed with Proper Image Optimization

For a website to perform better in search engine ranking, maintaining quick loading time is imperative. From an SEO point of view, the speed of the website is determined through its average page load time. From a user point of view, fast access to your website is crucial in maintaining regular traffic. You don’t want your viewers to go away just because the website takes too long to load.

In order to acquire quick loading time of a website, small files are preferred at the back-end. If your webpage has too large media files containing images, then the loading speed will definitely be affected. Image Optimization is a technique that allows you to make increase the page load speed of your website or blog. Even though you desire showing high quality images on your website, there is a trade-off image quality and file size.

Tips for Image Optimization:

Here are some quick and easy tips and tricks for image optimization that will help you boost your image optimization:

1. Set the Ideal Resolution:

The average monitors of internet users are capable of displaying images at 72dpi (dots per inch). So the first tip in image optimization is to decrease the resolution to 72 dpi. You can also slice up large images into smaller ones and re-arrange them on the web for better loading speed.

2. Save for Web Quality:

Another useful tip that most designers overlook is to save the image in web quality. A majority of graphic files include information that is usually superfluous for displaying on the web. Almost all graphic designing software like Photoshop and Illustrator have an in-built option of “Save for the web”. This selection gets rid of all of the unnecessary information in the image file with no damage to picture quality.

3. Use Progressive Property:

You must have seen on some websites where images appear as blurry and start to load after a few seconds. This is possible by using the GIF or PNG interlaced or the JPEG progressive property. Both of these options permit the image to load progressively from being blurry to sharp. This is a good technique to make your visitors believe that the image is appearing faster than normal.

4. Image Cropping:

5. Use <IMG> Tag:

The HTML <IMG> tag is used in web design to define a specific sized box in which the web browser can display the image file. This technique enables web browsers to continue loading the rest of the web page while the image file is being loaded. Moreover, you must also insert width and height attributes within the <IMG> tag, otherwise the whole webpage freezes until all the pictures are completely loaded.