One of the ways to slow your website down is to upload huge images and/or images that have large file sizes to your website.


It takes a visitor's browser a long time to download and display a photo that you added to your website that came straight from your high quality digital camera.

We often see images that have been uploaded that are over 2MB some even over 5MB!


Doing this will slow your website down and since Google, and the other search engines, use page load speed toa s a ranking factor, you are not helping yourself.


So is it even possible to use large high quality, large images on your website?


Fortunately, it is!


Keep to a few simple rules and take a little bit of time to optimize your images and you can do just that.


1. It's always best to resize the images to exactly the size that will be displayed on the website. In other words, don't use an image that is 1920 x 1080 px if it is only being displayed as a small image on your site such as a product photo in a store.


2. For full width images try to keep the max width to 2000px or below. Use JPG format rather than PNG since the file sizes tend to be smaller.

Optimize the image before uploading it. This will compress the image either without any loss of quality or with minimal loss of quality.

There are several options out there - here are 2 worth considering that are very affordable  and even have free options.


https://tinypng.com/
https://shortpixel.com/

Personally I use shortpixel but only because I signed up with them before finding TinyPNG.
- TinyPNG will compress 20 images, that are under 5MB, free for you
- Shortpixel will allow you to compress upto 50 images that are under 10MB

Bother are very easy to use.


Bottom line use the the size image that makes sense for what is being displayed on your website. Optimize your images before uploading them.