Reducing the Load Time of Your Site through Image Optimization

More and more internet users are switching to broadband each year, which is the faster and more efficient improvement from dial-up. Alternately, there is a large portion of web users who are still using dial-up connections to access the internet. You do not want to have an exhausting loading time for your site that will deter and irritate dial-up users.

Most of the time, the text on your website will load promptly, even with a dial-up connection. The culprit that usually slows down the loading time on your site dramatically is the images. It is important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users, but to not slow down the overall performance of your site. This is something you must take into consideration when planning your website design.

After you have decided which images you are going to use on your site, you should then move onto optimizing them to enable efficient loading time. When optimizing an image you are removing all the unnecessary information to reduce its file size. If done correctly, you will not alter the appearance of your picture at all.

Most images that come from digital cameras and Stock Photo sites are usually very large. Sometimes these pictures can be as large as 3200 pixels wide and 2000 pixels high, which is way too big for a website. The ideal size of an image for a website is between 200 and 400 pixels wide. This sizing is important to have the picture placed ideally on your site, whilst still allowing space for the menus and text.

If you have large images that you want to use on your site, they must be scaled down in Photoshop or another image editor. Ideally you can scale down the physical pixel size, which will reduce the picture without altering its quality. Another way that you can lower the image size when embarking on your web design is to save the pictures in a certain format.

You could re-save your pictures as JPEG images, which is a format that takes out unnecessary information while still retaining the information needed to display the picture without loss of visual quality. It is good to differentiate when saving pictures, because saving a picture as a photo will be different to a logo. A photo will have better quality, with a mix of colors being saved to a JPEG, whilst a logo with lots of flat areas of color can be better optimized saving it as a GIF.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that images are very important to your website. They will capture the attention of the visitor, and are normally the most important portrayal of the message you want to send out. To save loading time you do not even need to put as many pictures on your site as you think. There are thousands of beautiful templates available to the modern website designer. Many of them will be able to give you what you would be looking for with images and other fancy effects.

Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and web hosting company that specialises in building cost-effective websites and hosting for small business owners in South Africa.