Are Your Images Optimized?
Images and photos are an essential part of your website's look and feel. They enhance your message by connecting with people's emotions. A photo may be worth a thousand words, but if you're not careful and your photos are too big, you'll be pushing website visitors away. As the number of internet traffic coming from mobile devices continues to rise and rise, it is more important than ever to preserve the data on visitors' mobile plans, and deliver fast loading web pages. Keeping your images and photos as small as possible (optimized) is the first step in ensuring your site visitors are not chased away by a data-eating website.
Less to Download
When someone visits a page on your website, they must download every image on that page to view it in its entirety (at least the first time they visit the page). If your site contains a decent amount of un-optimized images, your visitor's data plan could be taking a hit.
Optimizing images and photos will not only be considerate of your website visitor's data plans; it will also enhance their experience by reducing the loading time of the page:
Faster Page Load Speed
Smaller image sizes = faster load time: the amount of patience a user has when viewing a website on any device is constantly shrinking. I know that if I'm searching for something on the web and I see a loading “spinning wheel” for more than a second or two, I am probably leaving that site to find information elsewhere. Don't push your users away with large file size images that bog down the pages loading time.
Many content management systems, such as WordPress, the world's most popular CMS, do not optimize their images by default. Many people are uploading photos to their blog or website, completely unaware of the fact that they could be saving their users valuable bandwidth and data. They say ignorance is bliss, but the end user will not be so full of bliss when those data overage rates kick in or the page takes forever to load.
Your Take-away
Image and photo optimization is a step in the website creation and maintenance process that should not be skipped. There is no good excuse for not doing so, especially when there are free tools available, such as tinyjpg.com, which can drastically reduce the size of your image (without noticeably effecting image quality).
Are your images optimized? There are many tools out there that can tell you exactly which images are not optimized, such as Google's PageSpeed Insights. So, run your website through their test and find out if you can start saving your users' data today!
