How to resize images to improve download speed
There are several ways you can optimize your web sites download speed, and one of the most affective is to make your web images as small as possible. Web images take up the majority of time for downloading your web site to your viewers. This can be a tricky task so we are going to look at some ways you can resize your images.
There are three types of images; .gif, .jpg and .png. GIF images work best with flat color images, and are in CompuServe format. This format will create an index of colors for the image, if a color is not in the image it does not need to be included in the index. This will help use only web safe colors and a small array of colors thus creating a smaller image. GIF images will always reduce to 256 unique colors. JPG or JPEG images are great for images with millions of colors like photographs. If an image is saved as a jpg file it will generally be a smaller sized file then if you save it as a gif file. Try to avoid resaving these files because each time you save you are losing the quality in the picture. The last type of image format is the PNG which stands for Portable Network Graphic and it is designed for the Web. These images have better color, compression and transparency than a GIF file.
Be sure that the image you have chosen is cropped correctly. You only want the relevant areas of the image showing, so crop any unneeded areas of the image. This will make your image smaller therefore your web site download speed will be improved, and your viewer will only see what is relevant. Also reducing the number of colors in the image will reduce the file size.
If you have an animated GIF you want to try and remove some frames, this will reduce the file size. Also avoid dithering, this effect will make the image look better but it will in turn make the image size larger. If your editing software will allow it you can use a lower level of dithering to try and avoid to much added file size. Another feature to avoid is interlacing, this will also make the file size larger. This few tips will help reduce the size of the image file.