[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Large image files can be a major cause of website bloat. You might be saving images at sizes 10 times larger than what you actually need. Do that a few dozen times throughout the domain, and all of a sudden you have a monster of a load time.
You could do this manually by going to every image in your website, compressing it yourself, and reuploading the new file. But, you can also do this with plugins that let you compress all of your images on your entire website from one dashboard.
There are a number of things to consider when optimizing and saving images for the web. You should consider what file type to use, JPG, PNG or GIF depending on the purpose. You’ll want to label your images correctly for SEO purposes and you’ll want to save them in the right color format (sRGB for web).
Depending on the purpose, you need to save images in one of the following formats .jpg, .gif, or .png. JPG is the most common format when saving images for your website and they will also be the lightest in size.
For filenames, please make sure they are appropriate for each particular image or blog post. Use only letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens and try to use only English letters. Characters from other languages, question marks, spaces, percent signs may upload incorrectly or cause unexpected behavior in your galleries or blog posts.
For example, if you’ve just completed a photo shoot for a personal training client in the Sydney, LIverpool area, label the images, personal-training-sydney-liverpool_0001.jpg this will be much more SEO friendly, and could provide better ranking for your site.
Optimizing images in Photoshop or LightRoom
As photographers the easiest task would be to just upload our high quality pictures. But in reality this severly boeats and slows down your website. Depending on the type of website you create the most commom largest image generally used on websites is 2400px wide by 1600 px high. Everything else can be much smaller and once compresses we we recommend you try and use images under 100kb each unless absolutely necessary.
Tools like Photoshop allow you save images specifically for websites and provides quality and compression settings that can dramatcally reduce the size of your images. As long as the image isn’t soft a reduction down to between 60% and 75% can more than half the file size wihtout diminishing the quality for the viewer.mIn the example below we can see that optimising the image down to 35% is stall hard to notice any quality reduction.
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