Beginner’s Guide to Image Optimisation
The smaller images are on your webpages, the faster your site will load which will provide your users with a much better experience, especially those on slower connections and even dial-up access. This will also benefit you as you will be using less disk space to store the images, as well as less bandwidth to transmit them each time a user requests them, so it is beneficial all round!
If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.
These 2 versions of our logo are exactly the same, the first is a print-screen taken from our website and pasted into MS Paint, then saved with default options which saves it as a Bitmap file (.bmp). This is a quick way to save files and a way that I know many people use, but it is one of the largest file formats there is for images. This has resulted in this little image being 56KB, for an average dialup user this would take around 10 seconds just to download this tiny image. The second version is exactly the same image which is in Portable Network Graphics format (.png). This is a lossless compression, so the image is exactly the same as the bitmap, however in png it is just under 2KB. This would be downloaded by your average dialup user in under 0.5 seconds! The total compression achieved is 96.7%, the resulting png is over 30x smaller than the original!
To compress this file, I used a very useful website which offers free image compression, you can find this at www.smush.it and it is very easy to use. If you are still in the process of creating your site, you can click the Uploader option and this lets you select your images and upload them. Once they are uploaded it compresses them, then gives you the option to download them in a single zip file. It also has a URL option, you can tell it the path to an image that is already hosted and it can compress this for you and again let you download it. It gives you a full run down of the savings you are achieving too!
Image compression may not be the most exciting of subjects, however I’m sure you’ll agree that potential cost savings due to disk space and bandwidth, coupled with a better user experience of faster loading sites makes it time well spent, with a service like smush.it optimisation is a trivial process!