Here is how to optimize images for website speed

Do you know that images and photos might take up to 21% of the total weight of a website? Having too many large file-size images is one of the main reasons causing a website to load slowly. And these days, users and visitors tend to immediately abandon a site if it takes too much time to load. You know that, right? That’s the reason why it’s crucial to optimize images before uploading them to the web. If you want to know tips on how to optimize images for website speed test, this article is for you. Check it out right now!

JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs: Choose the right file format

For most of us, PNG, JPG (or JPEG), and GIF are the 3 most common image file formats for use on a website. Each one of them comes with different features as well as pros and cons. Choosing the right image file type is the first and important step that you should focus on to optimize the images before doing anything else.

By featuring a huge color palette, JPG images are ideal for showing off complex photographs that contain a lot of colors, gradients, shadows, or complex patterns. This image file format can be saved in high-quality, low-quality, or anywhere else between them. However, JPEG doesn’t work for transparent images.

If you need a file format that can work for images with transparent backgrounds, then it’s so good to choose PNG. But when it comes to colors, PNG seems not as diverse as JPG, especially PNG-8 when it just has a very limited color palette of 256 colors.

About GIF, well, it is a common and widely-used animated image format. Like PNG-8, GIF also supports just 256 colors.

So, to keep things simple, JPEG format seems to be the best choice for photos and images having a lot of colors, while PNG should be for simple ones or transparent images, and GIF is just for animated ones. That’s how to optimize images for website speed by picking the right image file format.

Reduce dimensions of images

One of the easiest and most effective ways to optimize images and photos for websites is to reduce their dimensions before uploading. Do you know that raw images from your smartphone or especially your digital camera come with very high resolution and really large file dimensions (width and height)?

These photographs often have a resolution of up to 300 DPI and their dimensions starting from 2000 pixels. It’s no doubt that they are high-quality photos. But in fact, they seem not well-suited for use on the web. By reducing image dimensions using image-editing software like Photoshop or other simpler ones like Paint, Preview, Canva, or more, you will decrease the file sizes a lot that helps your site load faster. Next, we will find out the third tip on how to optimize images for website speed.

See more: Website test

Compression

Image compression can help us reduce file sizes quite a lot without losing noticeable image quality. Lossy and lossless are 2 major types of image compression. Lossy compression removes some elements of the photos (but in a way that our eyes won’t notice), while lossless compression maintains the same quality levels of the image (but it requires the images to be unpressed before they can be rendered.

Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, ImageOptim, … are useful tools to compress images. It’s always necessary to experiment with your compression techniques so that you’ll find the best possible balance between the quality and the images’ file size.

Conclusion

These are 3 major ways to optimize your images before uploading them to the site. Well, now you knew how to optimize images for website speed, right? It’s quite easy, isn’t it? Hope that all the things mentioned above were useful and interesting to you!

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