How To Image Optimization For Websites?

By Author: Nitesh Ahir
Total Articles: 140
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Compelling graphics and images can significantly enhance your site. However, they can cause problems if they are too large. Large images can cause delays in opening, uploading, saving, previewing, publishing and viewing your site. This will be a source of frustration to you, and your site visitors.

We’ve spoken at length about minimizing load time for faster user experiences and why it’s important to do so, and today I’m going to shed some light on how to optimize images in Photoshop for better web performance.

An image is a fixed size and can be anything from 1Kb to multiple megabytes as produced by high definition digital cameras. Trouble is whatever size it is on the page, it all has to be downloaded to be viewed. Web friendly images should be between 20KB and 100KB each; depending on how many you have on a page. You can see the file size displayed below the preview of the image in your File Manager.

Many of us already consider optimizing images for Web use by reducing the file sizes as much as possible without noticeable visual degradation. Another aspect of optimizing images is their actual use, ...
... such as combining several icons into one image and using CSS for presentation or using one background image for several purposes, also using CSS positioning.

What image file format is best for web?

GIF - stands for Graphics Interchange Format, a bit-mapped graphics file format. GIF supports color and various resolutions. Unlike JPG, the GIF format is a lossless compression technique and it supports only 256 colors. GIF is better than JPG for images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings, black and white images and small text that is only a few pixels high.

JPG - Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the original name of the committee that wrote the standard. JPG is a lossy compression technique that is designed to compress color and grayscale continuous-tone images. JPG images support 16 million colors and are best suited for photographs and complex graphics.

Here are some good tips that can be used while optimizing your site images.

The first thing you need to do is, to choose the images carefully and have relevancy. Never use scary or porno images, even if they will grab attention but it will be in a bad faith and users will have a feel of being cheated.

The most important thing you need to keep in mind here is how much detail you want web users to see at the first look of the image. Once you have selected your images, you need to identify them, not just for your own purpose, but also for the viewers who are viewing the image.

The main thing you need to do is to use a name that perfectly identifies what your image is about and which is easy to remember.

Never forget to fill in the Alt attribute of the image tag in your site code. This will not only caption your image further, it will also tell users what is there in case the image doesn’t load properly.

There are some image optimization tools.

tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/
entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/
fnordware.com/superpng/
imageoptim.pornel.net/
imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx
pnggauntlet.com/
punypng.com/
luci.criosweb.ro/riot/
rainbow-software.org/programs.html#JPG%20Cleaner
toki-woki.net/p/Shrink-O-Matic/
sitereportcard.com/imagereducer.php
stanleyshilov.com/online-tools/image-compression/
webresizer.com/resizer/
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit.

Nitesh Ahir is CEO of web development company eSparkInfo Solution. He is focusing to provide best web development services to clients.