Smush It.....

March 3rd, 2015

Continuing in the vein of site speed concerns, this week we'll tackle image optimization.

Back in the day, lots of websites had text only. Or content. They were mainly for informational purposes only and how they looked was a secondary concern. These days websites are used for anything and everything so how they look can be paramount. The use of images, videos and any other number of features is what makes a website look great. People won't spend much time on a website that has text only and looks boring. People want to spend time on a website that is visibly entertaining. A website that will stimulate the senses.

So the use of pictures is a great idea to beautify the appearance of any website. The problem arises when the pictures are too big. A website with lots of images that are 2400px by 2100px will load slowly. Even if the image has been scaled down by the web application, the original image is still huge. So when a browser downloads a website with lots of large pictures it takes a lot longer to load.

Every picture on your site should be optimized to load quickly. One way of doing that is to only store images on your site that are the actual size that you want presented on your website. Even then the image can be smushed (optimized) so that it takes up even less bandwidth and space. So when the web browser loads your website it will load much smaller and thence much faster.

All images should be scaled down to the optimum size and then smushed (optimized) to even a smaller footprint before loading them onto your website. This will ultimately speed up your website which will help your Google rankings.

Nuff said......