When running a website, the amount of time your site takes to load up plays a huge factor in attracting people’s attention. Simply put, let’s say someone is Googling information for a science project. Your site has the information he needs. Now, you have tons of reference images and flashy objects to make your site look incredibly appealing. But if your site just takes too long to load, the kid is just going to switch over to the next tab that’s entirely loaded and close your tab without thinking twice about it.
There are a bunch of ways in which you can make your site faster, image optimization being one of them. If your site is, let’s say a marketplace for clothing chances are you will have a lot of pictures, the image type is important for the site’s load time. Images that have more colors are better suited to be stored as JPGs than files that use fewer colors, in which case PNGs are always better.
Image resizing also plays a vital factor in image compression and optimization on your website. Having a big image and then downsizing it to a thumbnail is not advised. Therefore, images should always be uploaded at the correct size as required on the website, rather than relying on the code to resize it.
Regarding logos, headers and other graphics that are repeated on multiple pages of the site, it is best to use the same image with the same file path rather than multiple pictures of the same graphic, just with different file paths. This means that only one image needs to load onto the web page, making your website overall a lot faster. The bottom line here is that when you optimize images, they are less likely to show up as a problem on a load & performance testing report.
Another alternative is to use CSS instead of images. If you have own grids or bars or any simple graphics that you can make with CSS, opt for that option. CSS-based images load a lot faster than actual images improving the load times of your website. One other thing that you may want to do is run a load test on your website in order to optimize the images. If you’re looking for a guide, there’s one on Amazon that you can read which pretty much covers all the details.