5 Greats Tips on How to Compress Your Website’s Images

Images are a critical element in today’s marketing content. They not only make website content visually appealing but also stimulate your site’s visitors to spend more time on your website. Even then, heavy and unresponsive images can affect your websites load time. According to a recent study on Kissmetrics, images with poor resolution increase your website’s load time by up 88 percent. This affects your website’s ranking and this obviously costs you traffic and money. This guide is all about compressing your website’s images to manageable levels.

What Is Image Compression?

In a word, image compression entails reducing your images’ file size without altering the visual quality of the images. The key aim for compressing images is to reduce redundancy and boost efficiency in data transmission. You can leverage on different tools to compress images before uploading them on your website. Some of such tools include Imagemin, MozJPEG, and pngquant.

Five Ways To Compress Your Website’s Images

Using Plugins

With more than 50 percent if today’s blogs and websites powered by Wordpress platform, plugins have proved a handy tool for optimizing website content. Plugins help optimize images automatically before you upload them on your website. Some of the plugins you could want to check out, and use on your cranky website, include Imagify, Shortpixel, and Optimus Image optimizer.

MOZJPEG For JPEG Images

JPEG images make a website look sexy, or don’t they? If you intend to use continuous-tone images, then the JPEG format is the best choice as the gradients are rendered clearly on your webpages. Mozilla’s MOZJpeg tool helps optimize any JPEG image. The merits of using this tool are that the resulting images have a high resolution and are easy to load on your webs pages.

PNGQUANT For PNG Images

This tool offers a nice balance between image quality and the resultant file size. It’s not uncommon to achieve up 70 percent file size reduction without any significant loss of visual quality. It is noteworthy to mention that you will have to download the PNGQUANT tool before you can start using it.

Leveraging On The WEBP Format

Besides trying to compress your PNG and JPEG images, you can also convert them to the Google’s WEBP format. The WEBP entails converting images into lossless and lossy formats that are easier and lighter to upload on the web. With WEBP format, you will retain the quality of your images even with the reduced file size.

Once you have converted your PNG or JPEG images into WEBP format, it may help to render them as HTML to browsers. Browsers that are formatted to display image/webp will fetch and display your images as WEBP while browsers that aren’t enabled for the same will fetch the JPEG variant of the image.

Wrapping It Up

Optimizing images on your site is a vital step to enhancing your site’s load speed, ranking on search engines, online viewership and, ultimately, the revenue that your website generates. That’s why you should strive to ensure every image is not compressed but also optimized to fit in to your website’s content and appease your readers.

Google Prefers Mobile First

What we know so far about Google's 'Mobile First' take on the web: Google rolled out a process of mobile-first indexing to a larger number of sites. The rollout was only for sites that follow what Google described as the best practices for mobile first-first indexing.

This was the first time Google confirmed that it would moving more sites to the mobile-first indexing process. Earlier than that, Google had announced that a select number of sites had already been moved over.