Images may be among a website’s heaviest elements, meaning they contain more bytes and therefore take longer for a browser to download. You can reduce the bytes in an image by resizing it for the web to make it load faster.

Image optimization is a skill that you must master if you want your website to load as quickly as possible and provide the best user experience to your visitors. You can reduce the size of your photos and make your pages load faster by using the right techniques.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the guide to image compression for the web. You’ll learn how to easily conquer image size and how to compress and reduce their file size.

What does Compressing an image actually mean?

The method of minimizing the size of an image file so that it takes up less space is known as image compression. This procedure is often referred to as “resizing an image” or “optimizing an image.” The importance of resizing images for the web cannot be overstated because it will improve page speed.  To put it another way, compressing an image reduces the amount of storage space the image file takes up.

We all want clean, high-quality images, but it’s important to strike a balance between this desire and the time it takes for the images on your pages to download from the browser. The lighter your images are, the quicker your pages can download. Therefore, you always have to please both, your users who enjoy reading your content with beautiful images and pleasing Google.

Lossless compression and lossy compression are two prevalent digital image compression techniques. The lossless compression technique, as its name implies, results in no loss of image quality. This approach is utilized in situations when image quality and precision are critical and cannot be compromised.

Technical drawings, medical photographs, and other illustrations are some examples. A lossy compression technique reduces the quality of the produced image by a little amount. This tiny decrease is practically imperceptible and difficult to spot. This approach is useful in situations when tiny changes or loss of quality aren’t an issue, such as in images.

Why image compression?

Images that have been compressed save space on your computer and are easier to email or upload on the web since they take up less memory. Compression comes in handy when you need to change a picture for your website or a social media post. Given that compressing images isn’t tough, there’s no need to avoid it due to a lack of understanding at first.

The above image represents a different level of compression on an image.

The digitization of signals is the most crucial stage in shifting from an analog to a digital environment in terms of image quality. The primary need of preserving picture quality may be readily converted into two key quantitative criteria for this step: the rate of digital picture data transfer (Megabit per second or Mb/s) and the total quantity of digital storage required (data capacity) (Megabyte or MByte).

How to compress your images?

1. Select the right file format:

Before you resize an image for the site, make sure you’re saving it in the best file format possible. Vector and raster images are the two types of image categories.

Vector graphics are commonly used in images made up of geometric shapes and can be used in the SVG, EPS, and PDF formats; they also zoom and are resolution-independent.

Raster images, like photographs, are suitable for complex scenes with unusual shapes and details. GIF, PNG, and JPEG are the most common raster image formats; however, newer formats such as JPEG-XR and WebP are gaining popularity. Raster images are not resolution or zoom independent, which is why scaling them up results in fuzzy graphics. As a result, it’s always a good idea to save several copies of the same raster image at different resolutions so that your users can have the best experience possible.

For the internet, three file formats are widely recognized. Those three file formats are:

1. PNG: It produces higher-quality files, but the file size is larger. Although it was designed to be a lossless image format, it can also be lossy. PNG is better than JPEG for pictures with sharp geometric forms because the curves and lines are smoother. Lossless compression is used for PNGs, which means they keep all of the image files.

2. JPEG: Lossy and lossless optimization are used in JPEG. For a good balance of quality and file size, you can change the quality level. For pictures, screenshots, and most other files, JPEG is the best choice. Lossy compression is used by JPEGs, which means the image data is sacrificed to minimize file size. You should experiment with the quality settings to find the best balance between quality and file size.

3. GIFs: For animated pictures, GIFs are the best choice. It just 256 colors are used in GIFs. It uses only lossless compression. GIFs are not that great for still images because they restrict the number of colors that can be rendered.

Check this table to know the different characteristics of each image format:

2. Reduce the number of pixels in your image:

Each pixel in an image is encoded with a specific number of bytes. The smaller the file size, the fewer pixels in the picture. This does not imply that you can resize all of your images to a very small pixel scale. If you do this, your pictures will be stretched and lose a significant amount of quality when you upload them to the internet.

You can, however, resize photos to suit the size of the website’s display. If you’re uploading photos to your website, see what scale they’re shown at and resize your images to match or slightly exceed that size. Resizing removes redundant pixels and can drastically reduce file size.

3. Compress your image by using the right tool:

Now that you know how to resize photos for the web, you’ll need the right software to do it. There are some heavyweight image processing solutions, which come with a slew of advanced modelling tools. If all you want to do is crop, resize, and export images for the web, Picsmize is an easy-to-use image compression tool that will make your work a lot easier. We’ll resize and optimize any photos you’ve already uploaded. This is a useful feature, particularly if you already have an image-heavy website.

Have a look at how it works. Singup and install now..