Making Your Website Load Faster

From ZebraDots Support

[edit] Overview

Many new website owners make the common mistake of uploading very large images to a website, only to shrink them down in the editor to a tiny size. This often happens when images from a digital camera are used. The result is an enormous set of images that take a very long time to download, when they should have taken only a few seconds. By running a simple program on your images before you upload them, you can save yourself and your visitors a lot of time and frustration.

[edit] Remember These Important Tips

• NEVER use a picture from a digital camera without resizing it. These images are MUCH TOO LARGE.
• The largest image size most users will ever need is about 640×480 pixels, or about 50 kilobytes (50K). You can see a file's dimensions and file size by right-clicking it in Windows.
• Your image should be saved at the same size it is displayed on the site. If you are resizing the pictures in the website's text editor, you are probably using a picture that is too large, and the user must download this large image just to see it displayed small on the website!

[edit] How To Resize Your Images and Speed Your Website Up

These steps must be taken before uploading the image to your website.

1. First, find the image that you wish to upload.
2. Open the image with a photo-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, or any free utility such as Irfanview, The GIMP, or Microsoft Image Resizer for XP users.
3. Use the software to resize the image to the same size you will display it on the webpage.
4. Save the image.
5. Right-click the image (in Windows) and select Properties to see how large the file is. It should be between 5K and 25K for best results, but no more than 75K in most cases. Any image larger than 100K should be compressed or saved in a different format. Sometimes saving the same image as a GIF instead of a JPG makes a big difference in file size.
6. Upload the image to your website and place it in the editor. If you are shrinking the images in the editor, then you should go back and resize the image to its final size; there's no need to have the extra resolution if you aren't going to use it.

Doing this will GREATLY increase the loading speed of your site, depending on the number, size and complexity of the images that your website contains.