Make Your Website Images Load Faster

Images are the lifeblood of many websites today because of the easy way in which they augment text. While text is certainly going to be the basis of your website, the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words applies here because not only can you use pictures to drive home the point of the text, but you can also use pictures to optimize your website in a way that the search engines absolutely love. However, while pictures are great in this sense, you also need to be very wary about overusing them to the point where people without broadband connections are not going to be able to load your website in any comfortable way. There are a number of things that you can do in order to achieve this and the primary one is to make sure that your pictures load relatively fast. Here are some ways to make that happen.

The Ratio Rule

If you are a person without a broadband connection, then you would probably like websites to be similar to the way newspapers are now. There are some pictures for effect, but for the most part the text is what you should really be getting at. Therefore, if you are interested in imparting the same effect onto your website, then the ratio rule should be something that you consider doing. The ratio rule simply states that you need to find a balance between pictures and words and the best way to find that balance is to actually come up with a ratio. If your ratio was a thousand to one, then you would only use one picture on your website per each thousand words that appear on it. This is a good starting ratio for you to employ, but as the world becomes more broadband you can probably decrease it to a much smaller ratio due to the fact that people will be able to load pictures faster.

Size Reduction

The biggest factor that is involved in how quickly an image loads is of course the size of the actual file. A 1000 x 1000, 20 KB image will load exactly twice as fast as a 500 x 500, 40 KB image despite the fact that the first image is a lot larger. While size of the picture and size of the file are certainly related in many ways, different file types such as JPEG files are more efficient in the way they store information than PNG files for example. Therefore, what you want to do is use a mainstream and efficient file type like a GIF or a JPEG and at the same time you also want to make sure that your picture displays only what you absolutely need it to display and does not have any extra space that might cause extra seconds for it to load. Online users are generally very impatient and if a picture takes 20 seconds to load, chances are they will have hit the back button and moved on well before you get a chance to show them the picture.
 

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