Image Optimization: Reduce Your Load Time Through Image Optimization

Image optimization is something we sometimes miss when creating our websites.

We take for granted and sometimes assume that everyone on the Internet has access to fast connections.

Although more Internet users move over to the faster broadband connections every year, a large portion of the Internet population still relies on slower dial-up connections.

Therefore, it's not a good idea to count them out of the equation when designing your website.

One major consideration we must make for users who have dial-up connections, is the time it takes to load your website.

An all text website will generally load in a very short time; even with the slower dial-up connections.

The usual problem with slow loading websites, is with any large images that may be on your website.

It's important to strike a balance between using the right amount, and type of images, to attract your visitors; and not killing the overall load time of your website.

You can also reduce your load time through image optimization. You can optimize every image on your web site to ensure that they load in the shortest amount of time.

This can be done by using image editing software to reduce the file size of your image, without affecting the appearance of your image. Editing software can also be used to remove any unnecessary information from your images.

When you save an image as a JPEG file in Photoshop, you can choose the qulity of the JPEG. Usually an 8 or 9 setting is satisfactory to preserve the image quality in a small sized file.

For image optimization, there are many free software programs online for image compression that you can use to reduce the file size.

You can also save your images in PNG format, to obtain the best quality, with the smallest sized file or in GIF format.

The image editing software removes all the color information not used in your image, thereby giving you the smallest possible file size.

The only problem with GIF format, is that the image quality is sometimes compromised.

Click Here, for more information on website usability.