Websites can run poorly when they are laden with many, over-sized images. Often, web users simply upload a favorite image to their blog post or webpage without thinking of the consequences for stability and speed of the site. But the average image coming out of a digital camera is easily ten times too large for the needs of a web-page. Add too many images like that and your site could grind to a halt.
Check out this informative post: How Image Compression Affects Your Website’s Loading Times:
Here’s some guidelines or "best practices" for adding images to webpages:
1) Restrain Image proportions to appropriate placement/usage. We suggest:
- 1600px for full bleed images
- 980px for large images in content
- 600px for half column/page images
- 400px for 1/3 or 1/4 column images
If you don’t have software that will readily resize images for you, you can do it with a free web-based appl like pixlr:
2) Optimize images
After choosing the right proportion above, run the image through something like this:
Here’s a few more online tools:
If you have an image below 1Mb, this tool does a great job reducing it further. Larger images require the paid version.
Here’s an option for shrinking transparent PNG images.