Image Compression Best Practices: Proven Methods for Efficiency
Beyond saving storage space, image compression is also about image SEO. It's called “Image Optimization” and is about getting your images to rank on Google and other image search engines.
Images with large file sizes slow down your web pages, which creates a less-than-optimal user experience (UX) and sabotages your search engine rankings.
Using an online image compressor, whether, in any image format, you can compress image file size, which compresses your website's images, saves bandwidth, improves your site's performance and ranking, and improves your site's UX.
Page speed is one factor that Google uses to rank websites. But other than high ranking, page speed is also essential for conversion.
As stated earlier, our image compressor online uses a lossless compression technique to reduce your image file size while retaining essential data.
Image Compressor Best Practices
Here are some general best practices when it comes to optimizing images for the web:
- Use web fonts instead of placing text within images; they look better when scaled and take less space.
- On your website, use a CDN to serve up your images fast to visitors across the globe.
- Use CSS3 effects in your images as much as possible.
- The image file size and image dimensions are different. Ensure that you save your images in the correct dimensions.
- Sometimes, you may need lazy load images for faster first-page render.
- Use raster images or bitmap images for scenes with lots of shapes and details.
- Reduce the bit depth to a smaller color palette.
- Use vector images whenever possible alongside your PNGs and JPGs
- Crop the white space to remove unnecessary data.
- Remove any unneeded image metadata.
- Choose the right file type. JPG, GIF, and PNG are major file types used to post images to the web.
JPEG (or .jpg) file types provide the best quality for the smallest file size and are great for general photos, screenshots, and web images, as in eCommerce product photos.
GIF (.gif) images are lower quality than JPEG images and are used for more simplistic images, such as icons, animations, thumbnails, and decorative images (but not necessarily large images).
PNG (.png) files can be an excellent alternative to JPEGs and GIFS. If you can only get product photos in PNG format, try using PNG-8 over PNG-24. PNGs excel as simple decorative images because of their extremely small file size. PNG supports high details and high resolutions.
Instead of reducing image size, if you wish to change its dimensions, you can get your hands on our image resizer which provides you with an easy way to resize any image instantly!