Size Does Matter Part 1: Images
Yes ladies and gentlemen, we can confirm that size really does matter, image size that is.
When we talk about image sizes, it can be one of two things:
- The dimensions
- The file size
In this example we are talking about the file size itself. The next blog will take about image dimensions.
How image loading works
Having large image files on your website can cause your website to run slowly and in turn, lose you business. Essentially when someone enters the page on your website, the browser needs to load all of the content and imagine if a user is on their mobile phone and has 25 images that are all 10MB each…… that’s 250MB loading on the page, it’s just not a good user experience as they have to wait for it all to load.
Large images lose you business
Google also likes websites that load quickly as they know that’s what humans like to see as well. According to Neil Patel, 40% of people will leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. With that said, it’s important to make sure all images are optimised.
Part of image optimisation is reducing the image file size as much as possible but still keeping the quality of the image so that it’s not pixelated.
How to reduce the file size
If you are a designer and have design software such as Photoshop, it’s very easy for you to “export for web” and make sure the image is as small as possible (file not dimensions).
If you do not have design software then it’s just as simple. You can use free websites such as Compress JPG to do the hard work for you. You simply upload your images to the website and they condense the file size for you. You can swap between JPG, PNG, PDF etc. Try it out at: https://compressjpeg.com/.
In conclusion, test and refine
To test how quickly your website loads, use Google’s page speed test: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ – this will then tell you if your images are too large. As a rule of thumb, we always say that images should be under 1MB so if any are over, try and condense and reduce the file size.
Final thoughts
So now you know that size does matter, it’s time to make your images as small as possible using the above methods. As mentioned earlier in this post, the next blog will be about optimising the dimensions of your images. You can read Part 2 here.
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