Attack of the giant .jpgs
February 1, 2021
You want your site to load as quickly as possible. Site speed is becoming an increasingly important factor in whether your site ranks. And it has a major impact on conversions, too.
A big culprit we’re seeing for slow site speed these days is – oversized images!
- Your 2,000 x 2,000 pixel Ultra HD author thumbnail
- Images that aren’t compressed at all, but could be, with no loss of quality
- A blog image with detail like a Hieronymous Bosch painting. (Actually, this would be cool, let us know if you do this)
These are easy mistakes to make. Fortunately, they’re also easy to correct. Here’s what you can do:
- Look through your CMS image library. Sort the images by size. Look for images that are larger than around 500kb and see if they really need to be that big. (And note that things like icons should be much, much, smaller).
- Most CMSes have plugins that ensure images have optimal compression. Or use something like Image Optim before you upload.
- Talk to your web dev. Ask: What are we doing to compress images?
- Talk to your graphic designer. Ask: Can you provide cropped and sized images, if you aren’t already?
- Build good habits. Whenever you add an image to a post from now on, make sure the dimensions aren’t any bigger than they need to be.
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