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Gain Website Speed Through Images

Do you have a slow website with many pictures? Learn how to increase the website speed through your images.

Is your website taking a long time to load? Do you have a lot of pictures on your website? Photos that are unedited can drastically bring down the speed of a website. This is simply due to their file size.

Images On the Web

Websites can display photos at any dimension, regardless of it’s file size. That is because websites scale images according to the dimensions provided. So you can have a large photo seen with small dimensions or a small photo seen with large dimensions without affecting the file size. It is because the file size doesn’t change with the picture size that websites run into speed problems.

Reducing File Size

A pictures file size doesn’t change without being edited in a imaging program. There is a wide variety of software available for photo editing. You have industry software like Photoshop, free software like Gimp, and online options Picnik which is available to edit images. While editing a photo in order to reduce the file size you must set the actual size to the size that you want to display the photo at. Once you have the changed the size, you then need to save the file as small as you can without losing quality.
When you are working with photos often times you will get best results with the JPG format. But if you are working with something other than a photo you may want to consider other file formats.

File Formats

There are a number of different file formats for images. Each format is designed for a specific situation. When working with images destined for the web you have 3 formats to work with, JPG, GIF, PNG.

JPG format is designed for photographs or images with great detail and variation. Using this format will give the smallest file format and minimal quality loss.

GIF format is designed for simple images with solid colors such as icons and clip art. This format benefits from the ability to include transparency and animation, at a reasonable size. However given the progress of technology, the quality of animation that GIF is able to provide has been surpassed by Flash and other media.

PNG format is also designed for simple images with solid colors. It has largely replaced the GIF format because it has better quality at even smaller file sizes and transparency support.

Conclusion

When adding images to the web a simple guideline is don’t use images straight from your camera. You should edit photos first to reduce their size, then add them to the website. Remember to save at the smallest file size without sacrificing image quality. Keeping image file sizes small will be an improvement to a slow loading website, and make a visit to your website much more pleasant.

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