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How to Optimize Images to Increase Your Site Speed

Optimize Images to Increase Your Site Speed
Optimize Images to Increase Your Site Speed

Images are the biggest files on your site, they negatively affect your page speed if not optimized correctly and they give you great results if you optimize them, which it definitely reduces page size and improve your site performance.

Add images is the best way to give our site a great look, visitors always like to watch images. We always create images in photo creator programs like photoshop to give them an amazing look but it increases the size too much which leads to very slow loading pages.

One of the most factors affect your page speed is big-size images, which it has to download first in the visitor’s browser and consume more bandwidth from users as well as your server’s bandwidth limit.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to reduce images size without affect its amazing look and saving data as could as possible.

There are two images resources in your site:-

  • External images (images loaded from outside your site like social images and post content images)
  • Internal images (images uploaded to your site’s server like header, favicon and theme’s images)

How to use Lazy Technique to Improve your External Images Loading?

If you are a fan of adding external images in your content like Imgur, Imageshack and posting
then you have to control them because it will furiously hurt your site speed.
Lazy loading image works by replacing the source of images (src=”/image.png”) with a transparent image (src=”/pixel.png”).

This allows everything else on the page (fonts, CSS, js, text, etc) to render first. In other meaning, images won’t load, appear or even download in the user’s browser until the user scrolls down and reach the image portion.

The best and faster way to implement Lazy loading image in your site by installing Speed Booster Pack plugin to improve page load time and save bandwidth for your visitors.

lazy images

How to Improve your Images To Speed Up Website Load Times?

  1. Compress images to reduce its size (without losing quality)
  2. Resize Resolution (serve scaled images instead of CSS codes)
  3. Installing plugin (to compress all your images at once )
  4. Sprite image CSS.
  5. Data URI scheme.

How to Compress images to reduce its size without losing quality?

Image compression is reducing the size without affect quality to reach acceptable area between smaller size and good look. There are two types of compression you have to know, Lossy and Lossless.

  • Image compressed in lossy format will be different than the original file, very smaller size and satisfied quality compared to the uncompressed image.
  • Image compressed in lossless format keep most of necessary visual data to generate a good look image with smaller size, but it will be slightly bigger than lossy type.

There are many online image compression tools, but KraKen.io is perfect because it has flexible web interface
and you can’t notice any different in image quality than original image. Although it can reduce image size by 70% which is awesome to save bandwidth.

As you can see in the following example, there is no noticeable quality difference in original, lossy, and lossless images

So, why not ?!

compress images

What is the Best WordPress Plugin to Compress Images at Once?

What if you just discovered today the importance of image optimization to increase your site speed?!
What if your site has many posts with a lot of images uploaded to your site?!
Will you download them all and re-uploaded them again with a compressed enhanced version, it’s impossible …. Right?
Then it’s the right time to install a good light plugin to compress all your images at once.
WP Smushit is the simplest, fast and perfect way to compress all your images in just one click and it will help you to reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO.

smushit plugin

How to Serve scaled images instead of CSS codes?

A scaled image is an image that has been scaled to equal the size that it is displayed.
Picresize will help you in this point by Easily crop, resize, and edit your images online for FREE.

it’s better to serve a scaled image to prevent the browser from resizing it before sending it to the visitor which will increase your page speed score.

Serve scaled images from GTM

Serve scaled images from google

What is The Sprite Image CSS?

An image sprite is a group of images combined into a single image, if your site has many images it will take a long time to load and generates many server requests. Using image sprites will reduce the number of HTTP requests, round time trip and save bandwidth.Also you should know there are many old browsers that limit the number of synchronous requests which will make your site busy for them, and this is the importance of sprite images.

SpriteMe is a great free online tool to generate sprite images , also it has a great video tutorial to help you understand the whole point and how is the sprite very important for your site performance. If you have time just take a look for this W3School Tutorial to have more understanding about sprite image .

  • Find background images.
  • Combine images into sprites.
  • Generates sprite code.
  • Re-Calculate CSS images background positions.
  • Add the sprite insdie your HTML page.

sprite images css

What is Data URI scheme?

Data URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme OR Base64 Image Converter in simple meaning, its convert images to a long data code and replace it with the external image link to reduce HTTP requests.
Imagine your site without external images links, how fast your site would be?! its incredible idea which make your site super fast.

Dopiaza.org is one of the best online tools out there to generate your Data URI images, as they stated in their tool “The data: URI scheme allows you to build URLs that embed small data objects. data: URIs are supported by most modern browsers”

What is the Benefits of Data URI scheme?
Reduce HTTP requests and round trip time.
Smaller bandwidth usage.
Faster HTTPS.

data url scheme

Images Optimization Best Practices

  • Search engine always love faster sites and rank them higher, Don’t hold your site back because you are lazy.
  • You don’t have to reach 100 score in speed Google test, but at least make your site fast as acceptable.
  • Compress you images before uploading to your site to save bandwidth.
  • Make your website faster by compressing your JPEG and PNG images.
  • Use sprite and Data URI scheme to reduce HTTP requests.

If you need any assistance in the above steps, just write a comment below and I will be so glad to help you.

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