If you are a prolific blogger, or even a “sometime” or infrequent blogger who includes images in your posts (which you should be doing), you might find your website slowing down a bit, or see your images taking longer and longer to load. The question to ask is … are you resizing and compressing your images before you upload them to WordPress?
When using images in your posts (especially large images) or pages in WordPress, the image gets embedded at a smaller size, so the browser rendering the page to make it visible has to pause and make that extra adjustment. This requires extra work on your server, which slows your website down. It will have an even greater impact on mobile page speed.
You can, however, take steps to prevent this from happening.
Here are a couple of free online services you can use to resize and compress your images before uploading them to your website or blog.
TinyPNG: TinyPNG is super easy to use, and can handle PNG or JPG images up to 5MG in size. You can also do bulk uploads of up to 20MG. In most cases, you will see a size reduction of between 50-80%, with no loss of quality. While uploading and compressing your images using the web version of the app is best, you can also install the TinyPNG plugin for WordPress and compress them automatically whenever you upload a new image.
For images larger than 5M, you can use CompressJPG.com.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t risk your audience abandoning your site because your images slow it down!” quote=”Don’t risk your audience abandoning your site because your images slow it down!”]If you need to resize your image before compressing, you can use PicResize before compressing with TinyPNG or any other service. The entire process takes about 5 minutes, but has great benefits.
You can also go back and compress all of the existing images on your site. There are a few different ways you can do it yourself, or you can hire a team like mine to do it for you. It might have a cost attached to it, but it’s worth it to have a website that loads quickly and shows your beautiful images without having to make people suffer through watching them load.
If you are a MAC user (I’m not), I’ve been told if you right-click on the file in “finder,” there is an option to compress your image without using an outside service. And, if you know the size and dimensions in advance you can also open up your picture file and click on “Tools” to adjust the size.
So don’t let large images slow your site down. All it takes is a little “extra” effort to resize or compress them and keep your site running smoothly. And as I mentioned … we can help with that 😉
Also published on Medium.
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In business since 1991, Terry Green is the founder/CEO/President of BizEase Support Solutions, an American-based, online marketing support company comprised of a team of talented professionals from around North America. BizEase excels at providing speakers and business coaches worldwide with seamless online marketing solutions, from setting up shopping carts and editing video, to writing blog posts and managing Social Media and PR campaigns. BizEase clients (who span five continents) take great joy in allowing the BizEase team to take care of the details so they can get back to doing what they do best! Click here to get our weekly tips ezine delivered to your inbox every other Friday, with tips on plugins, apps, and tools to make you more productive today!
Good reminder and advice. It is better to compress images BEFORE uploading. I use webresizer.com as it has some nice features such as making rounded corners and sharpening images.
Thanks Lynn! It’s something many of us forget to do, but if you have large images or use your own photographs, they can really slow things down. I’ll have to check out webresizer.com. It might be another good option. Thanks for mentioning it.