Top 3 reasons you should think about optimizing your images:
- You will save a lot of money on bandwidth and hosting costs
- Your page load speed will improve. This is a very good SEO practice because the search engines will rank your website higher if it loads quicker
- Your bounce rate will be low. People won’t visit your website and leave within seconds because it takes ages to load. What’s more, they will spend more time on a quicker loading website and visit more pages.
And that’s why you should think about optimizing your images.
So how do you optimize your images?
You use a free tool provided by Yahoo called Smush.it. Smush.it is awesome because it is a lossless image optimizer. What this means is that it reduces image file size without affecting the quality of how it looks. It reduces the file size simply by removing a lot of frivolous and meaningless lines from its code.
Step 1: Visit http://Smush.it
Step 2: Click on “Uploader”
Step 3: Upload as many images as you want
Step 4: Download the Smushed images
Thats it. Its that simple!
Pro tip for WordPress users
If you use WordPress, you can download the Smush.it plugin for WordPress and automate the process. Upload the image as you normally would, and it will automatically be optimized by smush.it before it is uploaded to your server.
Link to WP Smush.it plugin