You have 7 seconds to grab your site visitors attention … don’t let unoptimised images use them up
Slow site speed is not tolerated well by site visitors, we have an average of 7 seconds to keep visitors from hitting the back button and looking elsewhere. To make matters worse, it’s estimated that 40% of of people will abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load any content. Images play a big role in slowing down site speed and performance, so what can you do about it?
Optimised Images = Faster Website
We can typically break image optimisation down into 3 categories: dimensions, format and compression. You will need to use a combination of all 3 categories in order to optimise images at full capacity.
1. Image Dimensions
Image dimensions can play one of the biggest roles in decreasing site performance – larger images take longer to load. Images should be sized and scaled according to their use; banner and slider images that need to take up the full width of a page will typically be larger, but counteract this by ensuring that images within general page content and thumbnails are only as large as they need to be.
An Example
A common mistake is to upload a photo straight from a camera or phone to your website. A photo taken on an iPhone will typically have dimensions of 4032 pixels by 3024 pixels – this a very large image. You should aim to resize original images following the general guide in this section.
2. Image Format
Ensuring your images are the correct format is another key factor in optimisation as well as image quality. We recommend using Photoshop to reformat images, however if you’re on a budget you can use an Online Image Converter to convert image formats for free.
3. Image Compression
Once you have resized your image and selected the best format, it’s time to compress the image. We recommend a using TinyPNG to compress your images. Despite the name, you can compress both PNG and JPG images alike. TinyPNG uses lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG and JPG images without massively reducing quality.
