A picture is worth a thousand words, so the old saying goes. But what if the pictures are causing your blog to be so slow to load, people don’t want to bother reading?
There are lots of different ways to optimise your images, so we’ll cover a few from the basics that you probably already know to some that you might not have seen before!
Image Format
You probably already know that the three most used image formats on the web are gif, jpg/jpeg and png. Which one you should use really depends on the actual image that you’re saving – if you use Picmonkey then you can flick between the image types and adjust the quality scale. Just don’t use .bmp (bitmap) – they are humongous in size!
Dimensions
When an image comes straight from your camera, it’s going to be pretty huge size – bigger than any monitor any reader would have! A super quick and easy way to reduce the size of your image is to resize it to the width of your content, or bigger (to make sure you don’t end up with tiny images when you update your layout in the future). For example, the current width of content on Bonjour, Blogger! is 650px, but we save all of our images at a minimum width of 1200px. You probably won’t need images to be bigger than 2000px in width for a blog post – but this is just a recommendation!
WordPress will resize your images anyway, but for the Blogger users out there, you don’t want to upload huge files and force the browser to resize them as it will slow things down a lot!
Naming
OK, so this isn’t going to affect the size of the files, but if you give your images good descriptive names, then it will avoid you uploading 20 copies of an image because you can’t remember what it’s called. (Giving images good names is also good for your SEO! This is partly because many blog platforms, if hey aren’t given the details for alt text will use the file name)
Plugins and Sites
There are tons of plugins and sites out there that can optimise the compression on your images – we use EWWW Image Optimiser on Bonjour, Blogger! – you can either have the images optimise on your own server, or you can subscribe to their cloud service (which we found more useful when bulk optimising older images – our old host couldn’t handle more than a few images being done, which was painfully slow when working with thousands of images!)
What tips would you include here?
I have a question though. I have a Samsung camera, and even after I edit them and rename them, wordpress will always named them SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES (for caption and alternative name), and it is seriously annoying it. How can I change that?
For sizing photographs, I always make sure they are 72dpi which is also known as the resolution and this will before web usage :)