I recently did a weekly training for Marketing University where I got to choose the topic. Being a web guy, I generally try to pick a topic related to web strategies, web resources and such. During this training I covered a tip and resource on how to reduce image size.
The training was titled Website Things You’re Probably Not Doing Pt. 2 and is available to Marketing University Silver, Gold, Platinum and Titanium members. You will find it under the Weekly Training tab if you want to watch the entire training, but I wanted to get this article out there for MU Bronze and anyone else who might have missed this cool resource.
We all get so busy with day to day items that there are a lot of things we overlook. Many of these items have a bigger impact than we even know. Search engines rank your site on various criteria, one of which is site speed. Having images that load faster will greatly help how fast your site loads.
Something you may not be aware of that is growing in popularity is visual search, meaning it is good to have more images and video on your website, but you need to keep the speed of your website up so you want those im- ages to be sized properly for the Web.
If you download photos from a site like Unsplash.com or other royalty free sites, they are usually quite large. A smaller picture will help make your web- site be faster and not cause load delays for your prospects and customers.
Because the images are uploaded by photographers, they are usually the largest size they can upload. Once you download the image, there is a resource called tiny png that is very useful. When you go to that site, you are able to drag your image to the top of the tiny png home page, and it will automatically compress the photo to a better size for your website. It will take a little time to convert, depending on the file size and your Internet speed.
From there, you will redownload the picture to your computer. It can re- duce the files 50, 60, 70%! You can even go further than that and open the newly downloaded photo to your computer. It will likely download as a zip on a PC, so extract the photo (Mac will likely extract automatically). You can also resize the image to a smaller size which will make it even easier to view on your website. Normally I will open an image editor and reduce it to 1200 in width and let it automatically pick the height.
There is also plug in for tiny png also, so there are a lot of ways you can use this cool resource.
