Ah, this question really makes me wonder if the person forgot their math. I love that people enjoy sharing their images, especially well done images. However with better quality images, your blog posts will load slower. The bigger the images and more resolution (DPI) the larger size the image will be.
The, aside from the images on your post, you deal with images from the site’s design, and scripts like jQuery from your own site and outside sources.
No one wants to see a picture of food that literally looks like dog poo, and it’s understandable that you may want really great looking photos. However, you have to watch how you’re sharing your posts. It’s really enticing to just plop a bunch of images, but there’s ways to do it while be conscious of the load time of your post.
Most people will leave a website after waiting 10 seconds, but with consideration to mobile browsing, you want to try to aim to have website pages load under 5 seconds. If you think load time may become an issue, you can test the post’s page speed at Pingdom’s Website speed tester.
1. You definitely don’t want to put images that require your readers to scroll. It needs to fit within the screen. Example of this no-no (image should load as larger in a lightbox):
In fact on the example above, this wasn’t the only large image on that post. There were a couple pictures that were oversized and required scrolling, as well as about 5 that were large, but fit within the screen. That page loaded moe than 10 seconds… 69 seconds (oh my goodness gracious), and was 11.6MB in size!
2. If you’re using JPEG images for blog posts, consider compressing your images. In the case of WordPress users, you can install WP Smush.it. The images still retain a very high quality even after using this plugin.
3. Consider getting your website hooked up with a Content Delivery Network, also known as a CDN. This does reduce your site’s load because the site is served on servers closer to your reader’s location. You can read more about it at GTMetrix in their page, Why use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
4. Consider hooking your website up with some type of cache software. For WordPress users, you can use plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. There are many other cache plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory.
5. If you have multiple images that are grouped together, consider setting it up as a gallery of images that has some type of lightbox effect where the user can click on the smaller image and it opens up in a window. FooGallery is a great plugin for WordPress users to be able to achieve this.
6. For individual images, consider using a smaller sized image and get some type of lightbox effect implemented. For WordPress, I like suggesting to people to use FooBox from FooPlugins. The image in #1 uses that effect. I actually have a FooBox plugin review, so you’re welcome to check it out.
7. If you’re thinking of having a lot of images, try not to combine it with a lot video embeds. This tip also includes auto-playing video ads that you embed in your sidebar.
Remember, in the end, it’s YOUR responsibility and decision on how you organize your content. If you choose to sacrifice load time, you may be losing out on potential loyal readers.
Do you like to use a big images or just a lot of images in your blog posts? Are you optimizing your images and your website?
It’s important to work on your images so that your blog won’t get slow. One of my friend generally upload images somewhere else not in WordPress database and then fetch it in WordPress via entering the image destination url. It also helps him to increase the load time of his blog.
At our shopping portal we still see loads of webshops using images that are way too big. And not just for blogging but worse sometimes for their product images too. Images that are way above 3 megabyte for example. We always recommend creating (and storing locally for future usage) multiple versions of one image in different sizes. So you can upload the appropriate quality when needed.
Hi Nile,
You are choosing excellent topic which is about images, As we all know that images play a vital role for the beauty of our websites or blog. So, in this scenario we need to optimize it well for search engines. It is better for both search engines as well as our blog. By using WP Smush.it and other cache plugins which you mention in your article are the great way to optimize you website speed. Through this your images load quickly without slowing down you website.
Thanks for sharing such am excellent post.
Hello Nile, I feel like you are talking right to me LOL I have been told my site is slow and have been wondering about my images.
Well my delema starts when I read that to many plug ins slow things down SO Curious If I use WP Smush.it. plug in or choose a different one, wont this make my blog slow?
You would think that after a year of blogging I would know these kind of things??? I did take some notes and will be working to see if I can speed things up..
Thanks for sharing.. Chery :))
I generally use high resolution images on my website and also use smush it plugin to compress these images to a appropriate size 🙂 Thanks for shaing
Hi Nile, This is the probllem by which mostly every blogger suffer. But now after reading your post i have the solution of it nd that’s WP Smush It. Going to try it ASAP.
A slow loading website is not enjoyed by visitors and affects its rankings on search engines. WP Smush It is a great WP plugin to optimize your images. There are also many websites that you can reduce images for free.
Awesome images regarding images. I am always worried about my blog getting slow due to images. I use the smush it plugin to assist me in keeping my images as small as possible but still high quality. You have given me some great ideas here as well. Thank you for sharing.
I used to stuff my old blog with High quality images which looked stunning on my pc and also loaded fast, but a visit from my smartphone changed everything. It was loading like real dead slow and since then i started optimizing my images using image editing softwares.
Hi, I do optimise my website. I’ve been using W3 Total cache and also I upload my images to my WordPress where they are hosted in WordPress with HostGator. It’s much quicker than loading up images from other sites. HostGator usually works quite quickly.
I deleted plugins from my blog that I don’t use and it loads up quicker.
Totally agree with you not having too much video embeds on site loaded with images-
For us it was as easy as upgrading our hosting platform. Turns out that we were missing out on a lot of traffic because the website wouldn’t load fast enough.
Hi Nile,
Nice info! on How to optimize images. Like this we can reduce page load time and improve SEO, as page speed is one of the ranking factors to rank well on SERPs.
Have A Nice Day!
I haven’t heard of WP Smush It. It sounds effective so I’ll give it a try and compare the result later. Hopefully my pages will load faster! 🙂
I don’t think I have any issues with the speed of my site. Deleting spam definitely helps.
Spam has nothing to do with site speed or images. It only helps to delete them if you’ve accumulated thousands of spam. Some people think that slows it down, but it doesn’t.
What can slow it down and maybe you got confused was if your site was being insanely crawled by bots… aka a bot attack. That does drive up your web hosting server’s processes and can slow down your site. In this case, you’re looking to rely on your security plugin to throttle the bot behavior
These are some great tips. I’ve never really stopped to think about load time. I need to check over my blog to see how my images compare.
Thankfully I don’t think my images have ever slowed my site down (yet!). I’ve come across so many blogs with super large pictures that take an AGE to load though :/
Sounds like some good plugins. I’ll have to look into them.
Compression is the key to speed in my opinion.. we always compress our files down to reach the optimal speed we can get..
Yikes my site takes over 11 seconds when I took the speed test.
Fabulous pic tips!!!! More bloggers need to take notes of this because some… Ughhh annoying scrolling threw gigantic pics lol
I’m not sure if my website is slow? How would I check this??
Thank you for the tips! I find I have that problem sometimes!
I personally try to keep my images down to a dull roar if you know what I mean, and videos too. If I copy images to my computer I make sure that I buy a flash drive ever so often so I can fill those up so my computer doesn’t get bogged down.
I delete my spam very often which helps my site. Well atleast it seems like it for me.. lol
It can be hard to find a balance between high quality pictures and slower loading times on your blog. But you definitely don’t want a slow blog, because that drives people away!
Thank you so much for this information. I started to save my photos as .png and have been familiarizing myself with some of these steps you’ve mentioned. It makes such a difference.
Since I’m always into social media, I appreciate shares like this.
I use WP Smush.it and love it! It makes uploading images a touch slower when adding them to the library, but it’s worth it.
I use WP Total Cache – always works like a charm. I also found out that one of the reasons why it may load slowly is due to too many plugins lol.
I think I have been fortunate enough not to suffer picture loading time but then again I will need to test it out again and maybe use the plugins you have suggested. Thank you
I just bookmarked this! I love your tips. Very useful, I’ve been having this issue.
This is an awesome post indeed. I do agree about people will not wait for the page to load. Thanks for sharing.
Now I know. I used to visit websites with great photos but it’s taking forever even for only one post to load so I just stopped visiting. I think our website doesn’t take that much time to load although I must admit, we don’t use a nice camera so our photos aren’t hi-def. But they don’t look like dog poop, do they? (“,)
I’ve never heard of the smoosh plugin. Thank you. I can’t stand it when I have to scroll on a front page to see a photo. Way to large people!
Great tips! I use smush it as well. It’s great!
Thanks for the tips. For photos, mostly I use FLICKR html and it is not in huge pixel 😀 I know it is not fun visiting blog with loading too long.
Thank you for sharing these tips. Totally helped!
Thank you for sharing this!! I really need to decrease my site’s load time!
Great tips! There are so many times I go to looks at someone’s blog and I leave because it takes FOREVER to load. Thanks for sharing.
Oh man, where was this post three years ago?!? I had to learn a lot of this stuff the hard way after people were telling me it took forever for my blog to load. Thanks for sharing the info!
Now I learned something new! 🙂 Will try to collate my photos in one page so that it’ll not slow down my site. 🙂
I use both smush.it and CDN. By using smush plugin, I really start loosing the quality of the images, It makes the image a bit blur. And I have a question, If we are using CDN, is it really required to use smush plugin to decrease the load time? Does it really make any difference.
This issue so often gets overlooked Nile!
Thanks for reminding us, no to overlook a very important aspect of
publishing our content.
Because if for whatever reasons our sites take too much time to load,
both we and our visitors lose!