Compressing and Resizing Images to Improve Site Speed

Improve Your Site Speed, Improve UX

What’s up, guys! Happy Wednesday. I’m Mike Norris.

Today, we’re going to talk about compressing and resizing images to improve your website speed. This is extremely important.

 

Potential Customers Have No Time to Waste

No matter how you’re driving traffic to your website, whether it’s through SEO, PPC, social media, email — it doesn’t matter. If your website takes over three seconds to load, more than 50% of people will hit the back button before your page even loads. This is something we’ve seen with one of our clients. They had a website — a very highly trafficked site. We rebuilt them a new website completely, new back-end and everything, and their website traffic (especially organic) doubled and tripled within one month’s time, which is absolutely insane.

So just think of all the hits they were missing out on prior to doing that.

 

Compress Your Images in Just a Few Steps

One of the things I want to show you is a way that you can really quickly and easily
compress images in WordPress. Most of the websites we build are in WordPress. That’s why I’m showing you here. There are other similar plugins, depending on what CMS you use, but WordPress is widely used. One of the things that people typically do is go to Google Pagespeed Insights. It’s a free tool.

You type your URL in there and it’ll give you a score based on how well it thinks your website is optimized for speed. Now, it doesn’t actually tell you how quickly your page is loading. You might get a low score, but your page might still load relatively fast. Generally speaking, use these as guidelines; They’re not perfect. It’s going to tell you to do a whole lot of things that, in some cases, might not be best. So, consult with a professional if you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

Just Smush It

Here’s WordPress. This is the back end of the Youtech website. The plugin that I’m going to show you today is called WP Smush. We’ve got the pro version installed here — basically the same thing. I recommend paying for it. Smush is a very nice plugin because it comes with a variety of other plugins and it’s pretty cheap. Here is what that plugin looks like within WordPress to date. Our dashboard shows us how much we’ve saved, which is over 56% of our total website size (which is amazing).

So we’ve smushed — it’s called smush — almost 14,000 images, and we’ve resized about 181 of those. So, here you go! This right here is the super smush savings. This is what we’ve got by using the pro version — it compresses images even more.

This is how it works: you click this bulk smush now button and boom, it just starts running through your
images and optimizes them for you. All you’ve got to do is keep this page open while you do it. You don’t really need to do anything else. You can navigate to different tabs — it doesn’t matter.

What this will do is compress your images in bulk, and actually, if you were to toggle on some of the different options here, you can automatically compress your images when they’re uploaded, so you don’t even need to do this. It’s a great plugin. Everyone should use something like this, especially the free version. If you don’t use this plugin, use a different one to compress your images. It’s going to improve your site speed and you’re going to get more conversions, site traffic, and everything because of it.

Happy Wednesday!

Compress your images.

Thanks.

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