If your website is full of graphics and images, your load time may be testing the patience of your visitors. You can decrease the load time of images by stripping excess header information that’s saved into the file when the images are first uploaded. This may seem like a tedious task, but there is a tool to remove this information automatically!
Introducing Yahoo’s Smush.it, a tool developed for speeding up and optimizing websites.
Speeding up your site does multiple things:
- Decreases the load time for visitors
- Decreases bounce rates
- Ranks you higher in search (Google actually factors in site speed!)
- Decreases server resource and bandwidth requirements
You can use Smush.it on your site by following these five steps.
Step 1) Prepare your images for optimization
Gather all your website images in one location. Generally, these files are located on your FTP server in your “images” folder, but could be located somewhere else. You need to download all your image files from your site and put them in a folder.
Step 2) Visit Yahoo! Smush.it
Go to Smush.it and click on the “Uploader” tab. From there you can locate the files you want to optimize. You’re able to select more than one file at once, so just browse to your image folder and select all your images for uploading in one fell swoop.
Step 3) Be Patient
The tool will now upload all your images to their server and optimize them on the fly. Note: This may take a while depending on the number of files, the size of the files and your internet connection.
Step 4) Download your optimized images
After the tool has completed optimizing your images, you’ll be prompted to download all your images again. These will be the optimized images that will come in the form of a ZIP file.
Step 5) Upload The Optimized Images to Your Site
Now upload the images back to your server and overwrite the originals. My personal favorite FTP program is FileZilla.
Once the optimized images are on your site, you’re done!
That’s it!!
You now have “smushed” images and are one step closer to having a fully optimized site!
