Although internet speeds have never been quicker, using well compressed, optimised images within a website is still very much a crucial step you must take in order to keep your pages light and quick to load. Although we have touched on this point in a previous article – ‘Speeding Up WordPress‘ – is still a subject some users struggle to grasp so today’s post aims to explain things a little deeper.
Why Do I Need to Optimize My Images?
The simple answer here is speed. If you check any of our Premium WordPress theme demos, such as Foundry, you will notice its quick to load and offers a sleek user experience, although we do use a quality hosting service, which goes some way to contributing to this speed, the most vital factor is the use of we compressed images, which not only look crisp, but they also keep the site light in terms of page sizes.
Wont WordPress Do This For me?
Despite what some people believe, WordPress simply cannot take your 3mb image and serve it as a lean 100-200kb for you. Although plugins exist which can shave some data from your media library though complex algorithms such as the fantastic WP Smush – Image Optimization, they cannot perform miracles, it is up to you to supply a decent sized image in the 1st place.
How to Optimize Images
There are a huge number of tutorials around for this task – iv curated the best of these articles for the most popular software right here so simply select your photo editing software of choice from the list below.
Photoshop – Using Save for Web
Fireworks – Optimizing Images
Using Microsoft Paint for basic Image Compression
The post How To Optimize Your Images and Why its Crucial appeared first on TommusRhodus.