STOP, wait a minute, you weren’t just about to load that photo directly onto your website, were you?

Your photo looks great but non-optimised images are bad news.

Large file size images:

• Take longer to load, slowing down your website and making visitors leave
• Upset Google and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Increase the amount of data that needs to be held in data centres and then transferred to all your visitors – this has a significant carbon footprint.

It’s important to find a good balance between image quality and image file size. Read on to find out how you can optimise like a pro.

Step 1 - chose your file type

JPEG

JPEGs (also known as JPGS) are perfect for photographs or images containing lots of colours, shadows, gradients, or complex patterns.

PNGS

PNGs are most often used for text and logos/graphics or if you have an image where you want the background to be transparent.

Step 2 – Resize your image

If you've taken a photo, chances are it's huge - perhaps even bigger than your compter screen!  Open your image in Paint and it will display in its full size.

In the home tab click on ‘resize’ and then select ‘pixels’. Reduce the pixels number until it's approximately the right size for your site. This doesn't need to be exact!

Step 3 – Compress your image

Sounds technical, but there are lots of online (and free) tools that make this really easy. They quickly reduce the file size (the number of kilo bytes) without losing any image quality.

We use tinypng.com (which works for png AND jpg images). It's as simple as dragging and dropping your file onto their website.

When you save your file don't forget to give it a good title for SEO purposes. A good idea is to include your business name as well as any relevant keywords.

If you want to see any of this in practice, this YouTube video provides a step by step example.

If you've got any questions, feel free to get in contact.