You’ve heard of the phrase “time is money” right? Well in the Blogosphere speed is money, or rather, a slow site = lost customers.
If you have a blog for your business then that’s a great move. I think everyone who operates online will agree with that. But if it’s attached to your business website and it’s got lots of over-sized images in blog posts and pages then that’s a potential problem.
You see when you have a lot of images on your site and you don’t take care to reduce the size of the images, it affects your site in several ways. Hosting packages are built around the amount of traffic you attract to your site and the size of the files that they must deliver to your visitors.
Every time someone goes to a webpage or blog post that has a large un-optimised image attached, it takes time for your host to deliver that image to your visitors screen, causing delays in the delivery of the page and increased bandwidth usage on your site.
So Why Should You Care?
Well, you’re going to lose visitors. Visitors can be an impatient bunch and will usually only hang around a couple of seconds for your page to load before clicking the back button.
If you have a large ecommerce site with potential for a lot of visitors, then that translates directly into lost revenue. You’ll also be hit for higher charges for hosting than you would ordinarily.
What Can You Do About it?
There are several things you can do. If you outsource all your website duties to another company then simply make sure they optomise your images. If you manage your website yourself (via WordPress) then you can do one of a couple of things.
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- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudinary or MAXCDN.
- Add Smush-It plugin
CDN such as Cloudinary and MAXCDN
A CDN is basically a remote host designed to optimise website images. It hosts and delivers your images to your website in an optimized format resulting in lower bandwidth usage and quicker loading website. The down side is that you pay a fee for the privilege. There are other downsides which I wont get into here but suffice to say you should try it and see if it works for you.
Smush It
I use Smush It on all my sites and I find it very good. It takes your images and fires them up to a processing site within Yahoo! and delivers the image back to your site reduced in size. It can have a significant effect on the speed of your site and it cost nothing.
I must point out that I have no interest in any of the above services. I simply reckon you can do well by your website from using one of them.
If you never use any of these then make sure you reduce the size of the image you use by editing first in Photoshop then uploading to your site.
Images: ”Colour images flow representing modern media technology/ Shutterstock.com“
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