Speed up your website loading time through Image Optimisation

Even though a large proportion of internet users are on broadband these days, poorly optimised web sites can still deliver very bad performance. Besides which, it is also best to design web sites with the lowest performing connections in mind. Users experiencing slowly loading images, flash banners and text areas will quickly become frustrated and leave.

Generally speaking, text should load pretty quickly on your website, even if a user has a poor connection. What really causes poor performance is large image files. You need to make sure that your images are optimised for size, and that you dont use too high a concentration of images, flash objects etc., which will all add to the sluggishness of your site. Before uploading the images to your site, make sure you have used an image optimiser (fireworks and photoshop both have them) to reduce the physical size, and therefore the download speeds. JPEG images can often be taken down quite significantly in size before the image quality starts to degrade. Lazy graphic designers will often use the excuse of wanting to keep the images at high quality, so they dont have to go through the process of optimising the images for the web.
If you are using jQuery sliders, or image changers, they will need to load all of the images before they can show the first one - if your images are 2MB each, and you have 5 of them, then your visitors are in for a long wait before seeing the slide show! There are quite a few free image resizers around, so do some research and find one that you like.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!