Ina’s Dollars From Home Blog

We’ve become an impatient generation and most people will not be happy with pages that take longer than twenty seconds to load. One would think that image data compression may not be as important anymore with most Internet users having switched to broadband, but if you want visitors to come back and keep coming back to sites for legitimate home based businesses, you will have to learn some image compression techniques.

So, image compression for quicker page load times should be considered as one aspect of website optimization, as well as techniques to increase traffic, get leads, improve navigability, hold prospects and close more sales.

The single biggest cause of slow-loading websites is image files that are too big and too many. Whenever you want to add an image to one of your web pages, use an image compressor to reduce the size of the image file.

If you have Photoshop, you can use JPEG image compression to reduce the size of a JPEG file by downgrading the quality of the image without significantly compromising the appearance of the photo on your web page. If you do not have Photoshop you can use a free online image compressor such as http://Jpegwizard.com, which allows you to reduce the size of your image file quickly and easily without having to download any software.

If your web page carries a lot of banner ads which you host on your own site, you can use your preferred image compressor to cut the size of those files as well.

If you have a lot of goods that you want to display, use thumbnail images instead of full-sized ones. When visitors to your website want to view a larger image they can simply click on the thumbnail.

It is easy to produce thumbnail versions of your photos nowadays. For example, FrontPage includes a thumbnail option, and Jpegwizard.com always includes a thumbnail when it compacts JPEG files.

The biggest problem with compressing JPEG files is that if you compress them too much they suffer a noticeable deterioration in quality. Another way to reduce image size is to change your image files to PNG format. PNG delivers good quality images with a much smaller file size than JPEG can manage.

PNG represents an improvement over the highly-compressible GIF images, but if you want to feature some simple animations on your website you would need to use GIF. GIF images can be turned into simple animations in a GIF editor.

However, you should be cautious about whether an animation would really add anything of value to your web page that would justify a slower download time.

You can check the download time of your web pages before and after image compression on this website: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Since the process of image data compressing is quick and easy to do, there is really no excuse for using large image files just because Internet download speeds are so much faster than they used to be. You should utilize these image compressions techniques to make websites for legitimate home based businesses attractive, to support your text with one or two photos or images, but also to get your page onto your visitor’s browser as quickly as possible, and definitely in less than twenty seconds.

The easiest way to do that is to use jpeg image compression on your image files.