Keep image sizes to a minimum to reduce the amount of time a user is waiting for resources to load.
Advantage of Optimized Images:
- Your pages will load faster. Smaller image sizes means faster page loads. This will make your visitors happy, and can increase ad revenue.
- Faster backups. Smaller image sizes also means faster backups.
- Less bandwidth usage. Optimizing your images can save you hundreds of KB per image, which means significantly less bandwidth usage.
How to Resize Your Images in Photoshop
How to Replace Media Files Already on Your Site
Discover How Big Your Images Should Be
Don’t have photo manipulation software? Try some of these online tools:
https://compressor.io/
http://optimizilla.com/
https://tinypng.com/
http://www.imageoptimizer.net/
Here’s another tutorial: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/how-to-optimize-images/
How do you find this manual image resizing compares with the automated smush plugins in terms of effectiveness, level of effort, and quality? Thanks!
Hi Heather!
Effectiveness: I always get a smaller file size when doing a manual edit. Always true if you are starting with a large file (say over 500kb.)
Level of Effort: manual takes longer
Quality: the auto-optimizers are careful not to lose quality, which is also why they don’t compress as much as you can manually. Manually you can see the immediate results of your edits and un-do if you think quality was compromised. I find there isn’t a one size fits all solution with compression. Some images can be highly compressed and still work fine for their intended use. Some images need larger file size/less compression to be clear and crisp for their intended use.
Best practice is to reduce the file size before uploading to your site. The smush plugins help, but if you are adding 5MB images straight from your phone/camera, those will still be too big after the auto-process. And most those plugins leave the original upload as is, so your media library gets bloated with huge images anyway.
If you already have large images on your site and are trying to improve your page speed, you can always run the auto-smush first and then manually handle any that still get flagged as being too big.
Google will tell you which images it thinks can be further compressed: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/