In recent years, with the worldwide spread of broadband internet access, it has become increasingly common for site designers to disregard the load time of their websites. Sites have swelled to unwieldy size, and it has become increasingly uncommon for webmasters to pay attention to the load time of their site. But with the advent of mobile web browsing, it is once again important to consider your site’s load time and different methods to reduce how long a site takes to appear on a device, such as a Blackberry or an iPhone. Its worth noting, however that efficiency never became less important; people just paid less attention to it. One of the simplest ways to decrease your sites load time is to optimize your pictures for the web.

It may seem like a simple step, but by reducing the overall quality of the images that likely take up most of the space on your website, you can take a big dent out of load times. This is because most image editors save pictures in the highest quality by default. But there isn’t a large difference between a high quality picture and one that has been reduced in size by reducing the quality. The key is to use an image processor and select the options save for web, or optimize for web. You will then be prompted to set a number of levels. If you are experienced with image manipulation, you can tweak specific settings, but a general user should pay attention to the quality slider. You should not overwrite the original version of the file, but rather save the new file to a different folder. Compare the two, and you will notice that there are subtle differences between the larger file and the smaller one, depending on what level of quality you selected. Higher than 60-70 % is difficult to notice, but below that isn’t advisable.

A fairly substantial amount of an image’s size is related to the level of quality, so your images will now be much smaller and easier to download. By optimizing, your site is going to load faster, especially for users connecting via cell phone networks, DSL, and those still using dialup. There are a number of other improvements you can make for your site’s efficiency, but this is by far one of the easiest.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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