THE SURPRISINGLY OVERLOOKED TRICK TO IMPROVE YOUR SITE’S PAGE LOAD SPEED
by Brian MellerWe all know that a faster site leads to usability, conversion and SEO gains. And sometimes it doesn’t require specialized SEO knowledge to improve site speed, as we’ll show you in this blog post.One often overlooked way to improve the page load speed of your website is to compress your images.This may not apply to everyone, but most websites have a portfolio section or a blog that contains images. If that’s the case, it’s important to reduce the file size of your images.Most people think you can’t reduce the file size without reducing the quality, but there are two ways to get around that problem.1. Resize the image to the height or width that will be displayed on the siteSometimes we’ll see images that are 5472 x 4648 pixels, but the site’s maximum width is set at 1200px. So if you upload that original file size, it’s not useful because the site will resize the image width to 1200px and the file size will still be 3 MB instead of 600 KB.But let’s say you want the 5472 x 3648 pixel image on your site to give users the option to view it full size. That’s fine, but you should compress the image to reduce the size.How do you do this? Simple.2. Go to Tiny PNG and upload your .png or .jpg file to the siteTiny PNG will compress the image and reduce the size up to 80%.Here are two files of the same image, but in different sizes. Can you spot any difference in quality?
Brian is Globe Runner’s Quality Team Lead. He’s our resident SEO expert who can also enlighten us on the intricacies of sci-fi and Formula 1.
