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Pretty much with every Pagespeed test I do for all my website I get the comment “Optimize images by lossless compressing image X” which often increases my page rank a lot.
I already save EVERY image with ‘save for web’ with Photoshop, but I was wondering how I could “Optimize images by compressing lossless” even more. As far as I know I’m already doing everything I can.
Really wondering..
Off-topic, but I noticed that Google’s PageSpeed uses a Retina device to check, since all my Retina images got loaded instead of the regular ones. Since these are larger than the area I got a 1/100 score on the mobile segment. Haha.
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Answers
This was a real issue with many of my sites, however I use the free version of kraken to ‘loosely compress’ all of my images and this passes the Google Test, thus boosting rankings!
https://kraken.io/web-interface
I must have used this for well over 10,000 images already!
The images you create in programs like Photoshop and Illustrator look amazing but often the file sizes are very large. This is because the images are made in a format that makes them easier to manipulate in different ways. If you put these files on your website it would be very slow to load. Optimizing your images for the web means saving or compiling your images in a web-friendly format depending on what the image contains.
How does it work?
There are two forms of compression that we need to understand, Lossy and Lossless.
Images saved in a lossy format will look slightly different than the original image when uncompressed. Keep in mind that this is only visible at a very close look. Lossy compression is good for web, because images use a small amount of memory, but can be sufficiently like the original image.
Images saved in lossless format retain all the information needed to produce the original image. For this reason, these images carry a lot more data and in return are a much large file size.
We also can optimize images for the web by saving them as the appropriate dimensions. Resizing the image on the webpage itself using CSS is helpful but the issue is the web browser will still download the entire original file, then resize it and display it.
Can you imagine taking a poster size image and using it as a thumbnail? The little 20px by 20px image would take as long to load as the original poster when we could just be loading a 20px image the whole time.
How to Optimize Images?
In simple terms optimizing your image works by removing all the unnecessary data that is saved within the image to reduce the file size of the image based on where it is being used in your website. Optimizing images for the web can reduce your total page load size by up to 80%.
Full optimization of images can be quite an art to perfect as there are such a wide variety of images you might be dealing with. Here are the most common ways to optimize your images for the web.
Reduce the white space around images – some developers use whitespace for padding which is a big no-no. Crop your images to remove any whitespace around the image and use CSS to provide padding.
Use proper file formats. If you have icons, bullets, or any graphics that don’t have too many colors use a format such as GIF and save the file with lower amounts of colors. If you have more detailed graphics then use JPG file format to save your images and reduce the quality.
Save your images in the proper dimensions. If you are having to use HTML or CSS to resize your images, stop right there. Save the image in the desired size to reduce the file size.
To resize your images you will have to use some form of program. For basic compression, you can use a simple editing program such as GIMP. For more advanced optimization you will have to save specific files in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks.