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How To Optimize Images For Your Website?

In this article we are going to be explaining how to optimize the images on your website. There are multiple steps that you can take to do so.

We recommend you optimize images to improve the performance of your website.

Optimizing on WordPress

It would be wrong to not mention how to optimize your images on WordPress as most websites in the world are controlled by WordPress. The good news is it’s very simple to optimize images on WordPress.

We recommend installing a plugin to optimize your images on WordPress. The most popular plugin would have to be Smush which gives many options for optimizing your images.

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We currently use a plugin called WP-Optimize which handles our cache, minifying and also image optimizing all in one plugin. Their image optimization is handled by a third party reSmush.it.

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Optimizing Manually

If you are looking to optimize images for a HTML/ PHP website it is also very simple. We often manually optimize images and there are multiple ways and methods of doing this.

Formatting: We recommend choosing the correct format for your images, you should use .jpg where possible and if your image needs to have a transparent background you should use .png .

Resizing: Before uploading the image to your website it’s good practice to check the size you need to image to be. We recommend making the size of the image a little bit larger than the size it will be rendered on the website as. For example if you are displaying a 500×500 image there is no need to upload a 2000×2000 image as this just takes a lot longer to load on your website for no reason.

Cropping: You should look at cropping your images where possible as this removes pixels and image data that isn’t required. This not only helps the performance of your website but 9 times our of 10 looks better for the visitor.

Compression: You should then look at compressing your images as much as possible without losing the quality. Compressing an image basically simplifies the image by merging or removing pixels.

We recommend a website called resizeimage.net. This is the website we use when manually optimizing our images. We recommend ResizeImage because they make it easy to achieve most of the above methods all in one go. You can crop your image, while resizing it and then compress it.

Step 1: Upload your image you want to optimize to ResizeImage using one of the options.

Step 2: If you wish to crop the image select the area on the image you want to crop and click “Crop”.

Step 3: Now you can resize your image, as mentioned above we recommend selecting a size a little larger than the size you plan to render it to.

Step 4: You can now select the format you want the image to be exported as.

Step 5: You can now optimize your image which means it will compress the image.

Step 6: Once you are finished simply click “Resize Image”.

Step 7: You can now see the results of your optimizations and then download the image.

We hope this has helped and if you have any questions be sure to get in touch!

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