Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

This article explains a few things about image optimization, and if you're interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you don't know.

Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization


Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time precise on a dialup connection. The culprit of quiescent - loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is sheer important to strike a delicate tally between using just enough images to trail your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you find yourself confused by what you've read to this point, don't despair. Everything should be crystal clear by the time you finish.

If you own Photoshop, it will express obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the " quality " of the JPEG image - - normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough because it will preserve the merit of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

On the other cooperation, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF harmony - - the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

You can't predict when knowing something extra  will come in handy. If you learned anything new  in this article, you should file the article where you can find it again.