Every so often we get approached by a business owner looking to make improvements to an existing site. When evaluating someone’s web presence, we think it’s extremely important to take the time to understand their needs and goals, as context plays a major role in building an effective website.
That being said, one issue we see fairly often is the use of uncompressed images for design elements, photo galleries, and blog posts. The file size of these images ends up much larger than necessary, and can have a huge affect on load times (especially on mobile devices). For someone who knows their way around Photoshop, the Save for Web feature can go a long way in reducing the file sizes without having too much of an impact on quality.
For everyone else, or for those who want to further optimize their compressed images, one of the quickest tricks is to run your .jpg and .png files through TinyPNG.
The service can significantly compress images (I’ve seen file sizes reduced by over 70%) with little to no visible loss in quality. The basic service is free, and they offer WordPress and Photoshop plugins, as well as a developer API (I should note we have zero vested interest, we just really like what they do).
If you’re looking to make some quick improvements, give it a try and let us know how it goes.