How to Optimize Images for Web and Performance. Trust us, you dont want Google to hate your website. Fortunately, you can reduce your images file sizes to help improve your websites performance. One problem with formatting them is that modifications often reduce their quality which in turn might make the visitor hate your website. Thats not a bad thing as long as you dont make them ugly. Make your website faster and save bandwidth. TinyPNG optimizes your PNG images by 5080 while preserving full transparency FAQ Installation Instructions. Upload the wpsmush plugin to your wpcontentplugins directory. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress. How To Optimize Images for Web and Performance. The primary goal of formatting your images is to find the balance between the lowest file size and an acceptable quality. There are some tricks and techniques that let you reduce the images file size and still keep them pretty enough to proudly display them on your website. So lets take a look at how to format your images without making them ugly, as well as how to optimize images for web and performance. Step by step guide on how to properly save images optimized for web and speed up your WordPress site. List of image compression tools, tips, and more. Tinypng Photoshop Plugin Full Version' title='Tinypng Photoshop Plugin Full Version' />The Benefits of Formatting Your Images. First, why do you need to format your imagesWhat are the benefits There are numerous benefits of optimizing your images for performance. According to HTTP Archive, as of April 2. So when it comes to optimizing your Word. Press site, images is by far the first place you should start Its more important than scripts and fonts. And ironically, a good image optimization workflow is one of the easiest things to implement, yet a lot of website owners overlook this. Average bytes per page. Here is a look at the main benefits. It will improve your page loading speed see our case study below for how much it affects your speed. If your page takes too long to load your visitors might get tired of waiting and move on to something else. For more information about optimizing your page loading time see our in depth page speed optimization guide. It improves your SEO. Your site will rank higher in search engine results. Large files slow down your site and search engines hate slow sites. Google will is also likely to crawl and index your images faster for Google image search. Curious about what percentage of your traffic comes from Google image searchYou can use a Google Analytics segment to check Google image search traffic. Creating backups will be faster. Smaller image file sizes use less bandwidth. Networks and browsers will appreciate this. Requires less storage space on your server this depends upon how many thumbnails you optimizeHow To Optimize Images for Web and Performance. The primary goal of formatting your images is to find the balance between the lowest file size and an acceptable quality. There is more than one way to perform almost all of these optimizations. One of the most popular tools ways is to simply compress them before uploading to Word. Press. Usually, this can be done in a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Some of these tasks can also be performed using plugins, which we will go into more below. The two primary things to consider are the file format and type of compression you use. By choosing the right combination of file format and compression type you can reduce your image size by as much as 5 times. Youll have to experiment with each image or file format to see what works best. Choose the Right File Format. Before you start modifying your images, make sure youve chosen the best file type. There are several types of files you can use PNG produces higher quality images, but also has a larger file size. It only uses lossless compression. Gta San Andreas Game Setup Exe S. JPEG uses lossy and lossless optimization. You can adjust the quality level for a good balance of quality and file size. GIF only uses 2. Its the best choice for animated images. It only uses lossless compression. There are several others, such as JPEG XR and Web. P, but theyre not universally supported by all browsers. Ideally, you should use JPEG or JPG for images with lots of color and PNG for simple images. Compression Quality vs Size. Here is an example of what can happen you compress an image too much. The first is using a very low compression rate, which results in the highest quality but larger file size. The second is using a very high compression rate, which results in a very low quality image but smaller file size. Note The original image untouched is 2. MB. Low compression high quality JPG 5. KBHigh compression low quality JPG 6. KBAs you can see the first image above is 5. KB. That is pretty large for one photo It is generally best if you can keep a webpages total weight under 1 or 2 MB in size. KB would be a fourth of that already. The second image obviously looks horrible, but then it is only 6. KB. What you want to do is find a happy medium between your compression rate quality and the file size. So we took the image again at a medium compression rate and as you can see below, the quality looks good now and the file size is 1. KB, which is acceptable for a high resolution photo. This is almost 4x smaller than the original photo with low compression. Typically simpler images like PNGs should be under 1. KB or less for best performance. Medium compression great quality JPG 1. KBLossy vs Lossless Optimization. It is also important to understand that there are two types of compression you can use, lossy and lossless. Lossy this is a filter that eliminates some of the data. This will degrade the image, so youll have to be careful of how much to reduce the image. The file size can be reduced by a large amount. You can use tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, or other image editors to adjust the quality settings of an image. The example we used above is using lossy compression. Lossless this is a filter that compresses the data. This doesnt reduce the quality but it will require the images to be uncompressed before they can be rendered. You can perform a lossless compression on your desktop using tools such as Photoshop, File. Optimizer, or Image. Optim. Some plugins will apply Gzip compression to images minify them. Its best to experiment with your compression techniques to see what works best for each image or format. If your tools have the option make sure you save the image for web. This is an option in many image editors and will give you the quality adjustments so you can perform optimal compression. Youll lose some of the quality, so experiment to find the best balance you can without making the images ugly. Image Optimization Tools and Programs. There are a lot of tools and programs out there, both premium and free, that you can use to optimize your images. Some give you the tools to perform your own optimizations and others do the work for you. We are personally big fans of Affinity Photo, as it is cheap and gives you almost identical features to that of Adobe Photoshop. Compressing photo in Affinity Photo. Here are some additional tools and programs to check out Resizing Images to Scale. Another very important issue when it comes to image optimization is you should try and upload them to scale, and not let CSS resize them. This is not as important as compression, but its another tip that will ensure your images load as fast as possible across all devices. If you are using Word. Press, by default, it resizes your images when uploading them to the media library. These settings can be found under Settings Media. You will want to ensure that the max width is close to the width of your site. This way CSS is not trying to resize your image down to fit inside. Word. Press media settings. The Word. Press media library creates thumbnails based on your settings. However, the original is still retained and untouched. If you want to resize your images and save disk space by not saving the original, you can use a free plugin like Imsanity.