Website Graphics Optimization

Badly made graphics can kill a business website stone dead.

What is the point in working hard to get customers to your website only for them to leave again because they had to wait too long for your pages to load?

If your business website pages are slow to load there is little doubt that in most cases you will lose customers.

The main cause of slow loading pages is too many oversized graphics.

Many people make the mistake of using large graphics and some sites even make their homepages of nothing but graphics. These pages often take so long to load that people just lose patience and move on to another website.

It cannot be overemphasized that the first page of a business website (all pages in fact) should be quick to load. You have to tell people straight away what benefits your business can give to them.

So forget about a homepage with a large graphic and the words "welcome" or "click here to enter" under it. They don't work well at all except for photographic type websites.

Your site should use graphics sensibly and keep them to a minimum.

There is another good reason for this - some Search Engines penalize slow loading pages and some directories with human editors will refuse to list slow sites.

Of course, graphics cannot be avoided completely and there is no need too provided you know what you are doing. Obviously many websites, especially for Property Companies and the like must have many graphics on their websites because people want to see the houses they have for sale. Likewise Hotels want to show their rooms, etc. to customers.

The key point with graphics is to make sure they are not oversized in the first place and then to make the file size smaller by a process known as graphics compression.

This process, when done properly does not diminish image quality and can reduce the file size by up to 80%. That makes the images load much more quickly.

Examples of before and after image compression.

The images open in pop-up windows when you click on the links. The first one will be slow to load, you will see the difference in loading speed when you open the second one.

Example 1

In this example the image is the same in both cases except that the 'after' has been compressed in file size:

Image before compression (50,819 bytes) - Click Here

Image after compression (11,576 bytes) - Click Here

Example 2

In this example the 'after' image has had colour, contrast and sharpness adjusted and has been compressed in file size:

Image before compression and sharpening (85,798 bytes) - Click Here

Image after compression and sharpening(19,887 bytes) - Click Here

 

We can properly optimize your website graphics for a good balance between quality and speed of loading.

Click here to send details of your requirements.