Images and videos are crucial for a website, but unoptimized files can slow down your page significantly. Large file sizes lead to longer loading times, which can frustrate your visitors and harm your site's performance. There are number of methods to speed optimise, so take the time to ensure that your site loads quickly despite having lots of high-quality visuals. Image optimisation is the process of reducing the image file size while maintaining quality, choosing appropriate formats, and using efficient loading techniques. Let look into details.

File Size Reduction: Proper image optimization can reduce file sizes by 40-80% without noticeable quality loss, significantly improving load times.

Impact on Website Speed: Unoptimized images can account for up to 60% of the total page weight. Optimizing images can reduce page load times by 30-50%.

Conversion Rates: A 1-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Optimized images help reduce load time and can boost conversions.

Mobile Traffic: Over 50% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices. Optimized images improve mobile site performance, which is crucial since 53% of users abandon a mobile site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

SEO Impact: Faster load times from optimized images contribute to better SEO rankings. Pages that load within 2 seconds or less tend to rank higher on search engines.

Image Optimisation

Tools & Plugins for Image Optimisation

Tools and Plugins to Optimize Your Images According to Sujee, here is what you can do with these tools:

  • TinyPNG


TinyPNG - This is a free tool that enables you to compress PNG and JPEG images without losing the quality. All you have to do is upload your images, and TinyPNG will make their file sizes smaller. It is a friendly user and more useful for fast optimizations.

  • Smush


One of the more popular ones is Smush, which automatically compresses and optimizes any new images uploaded to WordPress. Sujee in his experience found the Smush very clean and integrated well with WordPress installation so even if you are a beginner and looking for an image optimization tool hassle-free, then it works best.

  • ShortPixel


Another powerful WordPress plugin is ShortPixel. Providing both lossy and non-lossy(Raw) compression techniques. For those who are looking for greater customization around how compressed their images ends up, Sujee recommended ShortPixel. Fortify also supports WebP transformation, which is advantageous for any new website today.

 

Choosing the Right Image Format

Choosing the correct format for your images is crucial for optimization. Here are Sujee's recommendations:

  • JPEG for Photos

JPEG makes a great format for photos and full-color images. Gives good quality in lower file size As for photos on your site, Sujee recommends using JPEG so that the file size is not too large.

  • PNG for Graphics

PNG works best on images with transparency, like logos & icons or for other legacy reasons. On the other hand, PNGs are usually much larger than JPEGs. PNG - Sujee suggests PNGs be used for graphics with partially transparent elements or a higher level of detail

  • WebP for the Web

WebP is a new image format that enables the use of lossy compression and lossless for web images. It is compatible with various browsers today, and it can save files size up to 50-80% while making the picture quality even better. Thus, as Sujee mentioned we suggest using WebP if possible because it will lead to optimal speed optimizations.

Image Optimisation Good Practices

Proper Image optimization can also improve your site performance even more if you are aware of best practices. Here are tips Sujee provides:

  • Don’t Upload Originals


Resize the images before uploading them to your site and remember their actual dimensions that are required for layout. It wastes bandwidth and diminishes page speed to upload large, high-resolution images just downscale them in the browser. Sujee advises resizing images and getting the size right before you upload.

  • Lazy Load Images


The images load only when they may become visible to the user, this is nothing but lazy loading. This speeds up the initial page load by loading images below the fold later. You can easily implement this feature on your website as recommended by Sujee to use plugins like Lazy Load by WP Rocket for WordPress sites.

  • Compress Images


Therefore images should be compressed once again after resizing, even with the intention of reducing file size further. This can be done with tools such as TinyPNG and plugins like Smush, ShortPixel etc. In Sujee's experience, the best way to increase file performance and keep images as sharp as possible without compression is by compressing the image itself.

  • Consider Alternatives


You can also get a better media optimization by trying other formats and techniques Sujee has a few alternative suggestions:

  • Web-Friendly Formats


WebP is a good alternative to common image formats (JPEG and PNG, for example) Sujee recommends converting your images to WebP for its better compression. A variety of tools and plugins like ShortPixel do the conversion for you to WebP format automatically.

  • Responsive Images


Responsive images provide the ability to choose from a variety of image versions — types or number of bits per pixel. Which is great because you are avoiding downloading a huge image for mobile users. In HTML it is a srcset attribute that can also help you with responsive images. According to Sujee, For the best experience for all users, use responsive images.

Image Optimisation Good Practise

Media Optimisation Techniques in Details

Now, for those that needs something more advanced than just basic optimization from Sujee;Few of the advanced techniques he suggests are:

  • Image Sprites


Merge multiple images files into a single cheat sheet and show specific portions using CSS styling. This reduces the number of HTTP requests going from your browser to remote server, speeding up page load. Do: Image Sprite for Icons or Small Graphics (recommended by Sujee)

  • CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)


CDNs Allow You To Serve Images Or Files Over The Same Very Different Server Closer To Where Your Visitors Are. CDNs like Cloudflare and MaxCDN host your media files around the world, dramatically cutting down on load times. According to Sujee, she has seen huge improvements by using a CDN and you can optimise images.

  • Compression Algorithms


Different compression algorithms can be experimented with to strike the right balance between quality and file size. Some of the tools such as ImageMagick, allow you to set custom compression values for different image formats. Sujee suggests trying out different settings to help identify what suits you better given your specific needs.

Real-World Impact of Image Optimisation

Consider a photo blog that had slow loading speed due to use of high-resolution images. The following processes resulted in major improvements:

TinyPNG: This compressed images by up to 70% on all existing pictures.

TinyPNG compresses images by up to 70% without affecting their quality.

WebP Format: All the files were changed to WebP, allowing for further compression while maintaining their quality. Implementing a lazy loading feature helped accelerate the initial page load times. A CDN was utilized to deliver images from servers located closer to users, reducing latency. As a result of these optimizations, the average site load time decreased from 6 seconds to 2 seconds, resulting in a 50% increase in user retention and a 30% improvement in search engine ranking.

Sujee’s Final Recommendations

According to Sujee’s experience, it is best to start with basic tools and plugins when optimizing the images. It would be good for beginners who are looking for programs like TinyPNG and Smush which have shown great results.