Are Images Making Your Site Slow?

Everyone loves a fast site. Not only is having a fast site a huge plus for user experience but Google rewards fast sites with a higher ranking.

For example, one thing that some people don’t realize is that free stock photos are not optimized for a regular website. These images are too large. They need to be optimized for the web and resized before uploading them on your site. Using Adobe Photoshop, or other photo editing software, to resize should be worked into your process before updating your site.

The Most Common Reasons Why Images Are Slowing Your Website Down

1. Unspecified image dimensions: If image dimensions are not specified, the server must query that image and pull its dimensions before it begins to display the image causing a longer load time. For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary.
   
2. Images without caching information: Browser caching allows you to store some of the images temporarily on a visitor’s computer so they don’t have to wait for it to load each time they visit your page.
   
3. File formats: Browsers can load JPG, PNG, and GIF images nice and quickly. But, heavier formats, like TIFF and BMP are going to take much longer to load. So, I would avoid those!
   
4. Text graphics: Visuals containing text are another potential issue. Graphics like these would take a lot longer to load compared to a simple color/font alternative. An alternative solution is positioning text with CSS over an image. It’s better for load time and better for SEO!

How Do You Check Your Website Page Speed?

There are a wide variety of tools you could use but I’ve found that GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights are the most useful and helpful in identifying opportunities for optimizations. If I had to choose, I prefer GTmetrix because it provides clear recommendations on what should be done to fix the issues.

Okay, so you run the report and found all the images that need to be fixed, now what? That’s where we can help. Fixing the errors takes a bit of time, and this may be something you aren’t familiar with or simply don’t have the time to do. Contact us today and we can help with any image clean up that’s needed to help improve your website page speed.