Many businesses want that when building a website, blog or eCommerce store, it will look impressive and beautiful, with lots of visual content like pictures, videos, and other design effects. Beautiful designs and effects on a website are not the most important thing, because the speed of the website is more important and the weight of images on a website needs to be compressed.
When a customer contacts us for the purpose of building a website, blog, or e-commerce site, our web development and design team tries to better understand the client’s goal, so that we can build a quality, professional and clean website, and on the other hand be integrated with impressive visual content that does not harm performance. site.
We want to explain to you the importance of image weight compression on a website and how to do it in practice.
Some background on photos on websites
Today, the speed of the Internet is growing and making our browsing experience better and faster, which is why more advanced infrastructures and technologies such as fourth or fifth-generation mobile.
When businesses want to build a website to offer their services or an eCommerce site to sell their products, they want an impressive, beautiful website and lots of visual content. They rely on the fact that the internet is faster and therefore the consumer can see that the site is professional and beautiful so it is worthwhile to make a deal with the same business.
The problem that arises is a website with a large weight and volume of images affect the browsing experience. The browser has to load all the images and the consumer has to wait until they and the rest of the code loads to view the content. Moreover, when a consumer uses a cellular network of mobile phones, the speed there is not like the home network and the site may be even more slowly.
When your client cannot see the content on the site, he may simply leave the site. Therefore, any purpose for establishing the site may be in vain.
Why is it important to compress images on a website?
There are many reasons you can list them in terms of the importance of compressing images on a website. Here are some of them:
1. Conversion rate optimization
The conversion rate is the result of dividing the number of people who converted (purchased, left details) to the number of people who watched the thing. For example, if 100 people entered the product page and only 3 bought, then the conversion rate is 3/100 which means 3%. Enough that one more customer buys, and the conversion rate increased to 4%. The bottom line is another profit for the business owner.
Improving the conversion rate can be by way of image compression, better presentation, and weight saving. So the page loads faster, the images are all displayed quickly and the customer can easily see what he needs without waiting for the images to load.
2. Low internet speed adjustment
As of today (2019) the number of surfers who enter the site and use smartphones is at least 50% of all surfers. In some cases, the rate is even higher, such as mobile content optimized content or even various apps.
Nonetheless, the speed of mobile devices is not high, compared to the speed of the internet at home or office, which can impair the quality of browsing. Home or office Internet may not be enough due to the connection of many devices simultaneously to the Internet. There are even some who are unable to purchase higher internet packages.
Image weight saving helps reach new customers.
3. Saving of storage space
For web hosting services, the business pays monthly costs. As the site uses more files and weighs more, it needs a package with higher storage capacity. Which means more money needs to be paid for this package.
As you have cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, and others – once the images are large, more volume is needed.
Image weight saving means more images can be uploaded in the same storage capacity. This means that you can also save money in the end, an amount that could be saved and even invested in marketing the business.
4. Traffic Volume Savings (Bandwidth)
Once a user enters the site, the browser asks the hosting server to download the image, which increases the site’s bandwidth, or traffic volume. As there are more and more requests to download the image, each time needs to download the same image with its large weight.
Saving 30% of the weight of the image also saves space on the disk (point # 3 above) and saves traffic volume. Such savings are good for the consumer because his Internet browsing volume is lower. This also saves the bandwidth of a web hosting service – so you can save even more money.
5. Injury to Website SEO
A large weight of images hurts the overall speed of the entire site, which also slows the site down, which hurts the promotion of the site. SEO is a comprehensive service designed to optimize the display of the website in search engines, including how it looks, where it appears, and more.
Search engines like Google or Bing use the site’s speed to rank websites. A slower website will appear below the site faster if the other factors are the same (similar).
6. Injury to a marketing campaign
What’s more, if you advertise on Google, then you must know that Google is also using speed for campaign rankings and Quality Score. This means that you will spend more money on ads as a result.
Of course, Facebook and other systems also take into account the site speed parameter in ad quality rankings.
7. The big ones do it
If all this is not enough for you.. then the big companies also do photo compression. So here are some of them:
- Facebook compresses all the images you upload to the Facebook page, or to a group.
- Instagram reduces the quality of the photos you add to your profile.
- Amazon reduces the quality of images on the entire site.
- Google and Bing do this for all their sites.
- A lot of big, complex businesses do that.
So how to reduce, or compress image weight?
There are 3 different ways to reduce or compress image weight:
- Image dimensions reduction – Instead of using 1000 by 1000 pixels, 500 by 500 pixels (4 times smaller) is used. Very simple, image editing software is used to reduce its volume.
- Photo Editing – Background removal or creating white or other colors that weigh very little and thus the weight of the entire image is small. In this case, you can also use image editing tools and software to remove some background or frame.
- Image quality reduction – You can reduce the quality of the image by the parameters that measure the quality of the image. Like making a picture more blurry, not shiny, changing a file type, etc. There are various tools that allow compression or image quality reduction. Occasionally, you do not see a significant impact on image quality.
Of course, you can use a combination of these ways and even all of them together to reduce weight.
How much can I reduce image weight?
This varies depending on the type of method you choose to reduce the weight of the image. For example, if you purchase an image or download it in different image repositories, you can get a weight of 5-6 megabytes per image, and reduce it to 100 kilobytes – this means a saving of about 95% !!
Image Weight Reduction Tools
Whether you want to reduce the dimensions of the image (length and width), or remove a background or make it white. You can use all kinds of tools like Adobe’s, Microsoft’s computer painter, or photo editing software like the free Canva.
To reduce image quality, even without editing or removing backgrounds, you can do so using the following tools:
- Squoosh – Google Chrome tool that lets you reduce image volume, extension, and quality. You can also determine what quality to edit. Highly recommended, we use it. (Link).
- ShortPixel – A nice tool that reduces image weight, and also has a WordPress plugin. (Link).
- TinyPNG – Free tool that reduces image files with PNG extension, there is also TinyJPG for images with this extension. (Link).
- Compressor.io – Another tool that can reduce image volume. (Link).
