Nobody likes a slow website. One of the things that can deter visitors from staying or even viewing your website is slow loading pages. There are many things that can slow down a page from loading quickly but, one of the things that we see often is poor image optimization. Let’s explore a few options to resolving the problem!
Common Issues
There are a few common issues that we see every day when it comes to images slowing down a website.
- Images are too large
- There are too many
Testing Your Site
One of the first things that you need to do is test your site. This will help you understand where the issues lie. At 45Squared we utilize a myriad of tools to accomplish this but one of our first go-to options is Pingdom. Pingdom provides a suite of tools that will help you visualize where your website is slowing down. This is great for identifying pictures or other files that might be causing problems.
Fixing Large Images
The term “large” can mean a few different things. First, the dimensions of the image might be too large for a website. Having a large format image with dimensions greater than what your traditional monitor can display is overkill. Use a photo editor to resize your image to a size that looks great at a standard 1080P resolution. Using this as your benchmark you should have a great customer experience on any device. From there you can test on other devices to see if there are any issues.
The second issue with large images is that the file size is too large. If your image is over 2 megabytes in size it will often take a while to load. Especially on mobile devices. With Internet speeds increasing this is less of an issue BUT it is still something to take into consideration. At 45Squared we have a multitude of tools to use to accomplish compressing images. But, for most people, a simple tool like I Love IMG will help you compress your files to ensure quick loading times.
Too Many Requests
Another common problem is that a page might have too much content. Having a large number of images on a single page will decrease load time. Think about it, the more the images, the more the data. More data will always mean slower loading times. There are many things that can assist in solving this problem.
Content Delivery Networks
Caching
Caching and Content Delivery Networks are great advanced features that take some effort in getting set up. We recommend that everyone utilize a Content Delivery Network on their website whether you are running WordPress or not. A Content Delivery Network will push all of your static content to many data centers around the country or world. When a user visits your website the Content Delivery Network will pull the content from the data center nearest to the visitor. This results in lower page loading times!
Need help with your WordPress installation? Contact us today and let’s see what we can do to help!
