Let’s be honest. Images may be the most critical component in grabbing (and keeping!) the attention of someone who visits your web page. Selling a great product or promoting a strong message matter little if your site is one giant block of indistinguishable text or if your page runs slowly because of hampered bandwidth.
By optimizing your images, you shrink the file size and prevent your graphics from affecting your load time.
Intimidated by this process? Don’t be. Whether, like us at TagTeamDesign.com, you optimize your files using Photoshop, or whether you have no idea what Photoshop is (and every design level in between), here are 3 easy tools to optimize your photos.
1. jpegmini.com is a very easy-to-use (and free) website that will optimize your photos up to 5 times smaller than the original. Simply upload your image file and there you have it–an optimized image that still appears to be high quality. Recently I uploaded a file that was 638 kb and jpegmini.com shrank it to 210 kb without distorting the image at all. This change in file size will significantly protect load time and prevent bounce rate. It should be noted that page speed is a major factor for SEO, so paying attention to graphic size is of extreme importance.
2. CompressNow is another free online service that allows you to upload GIF, JPG, and PNG files. Unlike jpegmini.com, this service lets you drag and drop up to 10 images at a time, which is incredibly handy if you need to work with multiple photos for your site. CompressNow proves the theory that optimizing images is a simple, quick process that is well worth the effort it takes to maintain your website’s performance. With CompressNow, you have zero reason not to optimize your images.
3. Shrink O’matic is an Adobe AIR application that resizes JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs when you drag and drop images to the app. Unlike jpegmini.com and CompressNow, this application is a little more intense because you have the option to customize your settlings and upload a batch of pictures at once. If you are at all intimidated by choices, simply stick to the previous two options and you’ll essentially accomplish the same goal.
Never underestimate the importance of optimizing your images on your website. When you optimize your photos, you improve load time and reduce bandwidth which can result in improved search engine ranking and increased page visits which eventually means better sales or stronger contacts (which is the goal, right?) And you can do all of this for free on easy-to-access sites. Doesn’t get any better than that!
Now go … lower those file sizes.
Is it time for you to get help with your website? Tag Team Design can help!