Speed up your website with these three non techy image optimisation techniques

Images that are too large will slow down the load speed of your website, providing a clunky experience for your users, increasing bounce rates and damaging the SEO of your website.

So what can I do about it?

There’s a lot of ways you can optimise your images, but I’m going to show you the quick, easy and free method which will give you 80% of the results for very little effort and technical knowhow

It’s an easy fix, it just takes an extra minute of time and a few extra steps before you upload images to your website. So without further ado, let’s get into learning what we can do to optimise our images and speed up our website.

Step One – Plan what size your images actually need to be

A raw image from a camera or stock photography site is on average 20x too large for your website in both dimensions and file size, so the first thing we have to do is to figure out what size we need to crop our images to.

As a rule of thumb you should use the following pixel dimensions

• Full width masthead image should be a maximum width of 1650px – 1900px wide
• Blog post image should be a maximum width of 1250px wide
• Half page image should be a maximum width of 800px
• Third page images should be a maximum width of 600px wide

1. Click “Open From Computer” and open your file
2. Click “File”, and then “Export As JPG”
3. Change the width to your desired width
4. Change the quality to 35% (tweak to desired quality) and make sure the “attach metadata” is unchecked

Then we can save the image and it’s ready to upload to our website.

Step Three – Use a WordPress Optimisation plugin to convert the image from JPEG to WebP format

The final step is to convert the image file to be served as webP format, which we can so using free a wordpress plugin called “autoptimize”.

WebP is a new image format which was created by Google to reduce the file size of images on the web. It can reduce your image filesize by an average of 30%

Upload and install  https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/ plugin and navigate to “settings” > “autoptimize”.

Navigate to the “Images” tab, and then toggle on the checkboxes for “Optimise images” and “Load WebP in supported browsers?” and then click “save changes”

Now all your existing images and any new images that you upload to your website will be converted to webP image format.

Congratulations your images are now optimised!

It’s as easy as that. Your images are now cropped to size and fully optimised on your website. If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post or the accompanying youtube video.