Reducing Page Load Time by Optimizing Images

June 3, 2007 | By Terry Stockdale | In Design Decisions, Graphics, Visitor Experience, Web design tools 

Even though more and more Internet users have switched to broadband, there is still a large segment of the web’s users who are running on dialup connections. Therefore, it is not wise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website. We have to seriously consider the effect of page-loading time on our site visitors who use dialup.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The problem with slow-loading sites is usually large images. It is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also take the extra steps to 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. Not only do you reduce the size of an image, but, with JPG images, you can specify the quality of the resulting image.

If you own Adobe Photoshop, Ulead PhotoImpace, JASC’s PaintShop Pro or many other graphics editors, it will be 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 as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have any of these editors, there are also many free image editors and compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

You can also opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can save your images in GIF format — 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!

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