Images bring life to your content and help boost engagement. Researchers have found that using colored visuals make people 80% more likely to read your content.
But if your images
aren’t optimized, they could be hurting extra than helping. In fact, non-optimized
images are one of the most common speed issues we see on beginner websites.
Before you upload a
photo directly from your phone or camera, we advise that you use photo
editing software to optimize your images for web.
In their original
format, these photos can have huge file sizes. But based on the image file format and the compression you choose in your editing software, you
can decrease your image size by up to 5x.
At Tutpoints, we only
use two image formats: JPEG and PNG.
Now you might be wondering:
what’s the variation?
Well, PNG image format is uncompressed. When you
compress an image it loses some information, so an uncompressed image will be
higher quality with more detail. The downside is that it’s a larger file size,
so it takes longer to load.
JPEG, on the other hand,
is a compressed file format which slightly reduces image quality, but it’s
significantly smaller in size.
So how do we decide
which image format to decide?
§ If our photo or image has a lot of different
colors, then we use JPEG.
§ If it’s a simpler image or we need a
transparent image, then we use PNG.
The majority of our
images are JPEGs.
Below is a comparison
chart of the file sizes and different compression tool that we could have use
for the StrangeLoop image use above.
As you can see in the
chart, the image format you use can make a HUGE difference on your website
performance.
For details on exactly
how to optimize your images using Photoshop and other popular editing tool,
without sacrificing quality,
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