The typical homeowner is an inpatient beast when surfing the web. You need to be sure they don’t “bounce” because your web site isn’t giving them immediate gratification. So give them what they want—now! Here’s part 2 of our series.
What You Can Learn:
- You Don’t Need Graphics Knowledge of Any Kind
- You Don’t Need Money
- Why You Must Optimize All Your Images
- Easy Hack To Get The Exact Image Size You Need
- Easy Hack To Make Images Load as Fast Possible
Introduction
OK so in Part One of this series we talked about finding the best size for each graphic that is on one of your site’s pages. That is in fact part one of your job. So now you should have looked at all the images on a page and made a note of the exact dimensions each needs to be. Today in Part 2 of the job you will resize each graphic image to those dimensions you have and then squash them so they carry almost no weight in loading time. Walk through this with me now —how to resize images and then compress them as best as possible.
Our Criteria
Now there are a bunch of different ways to do this. But I chose tools based on 2 criteria; first they are free tools and second you don’t need to have any graphics skills to get these done. So fear not, go a little further with me. Even if you do not know anything at all about resizing images, as long as you know what size they need to be, you’re ready. Let’s go!
Make Them Right
Your resize tool is online at befunky.com. Very simple to use! Start by loading an image. When that image shows up, click the left hand menu item “Resize”.
You can see on the left hand side of the screen it’s giving me the width and the height in pixels.
Just use this little tab underneath to resize it the target size you want. Almost always you’re going to want “Lock Aspect Ratio” checked because otherwise it will change the way the image looks. In this dialog box, start moving either the width or height until you reach your targeted size. As you click, you can see the image scaling down. Just continue until you get to the desired size.
Now it’s resized to the size you need. Piece of cake, right? Now all you have to do is save it to your computer. Click the “Save” tab above the picture. There are a few choices here. For now I am going to save it as a “.png” file which is normally gives you better quality.
Squash Them Like A Bug
Next step; you’ll want to compress each image as much as possible. This is so it’ll load for your website visitors as fast as possible. That way they-won’t-get-tired-of-waiting-and-bounce. (That’s why we’re here, remember?)
For this piece of the process, go to another free site called Compressor.io. I know many people use Tinypng.com for this, but in my tests Compressor.io makes images even smaller with little or no loss in quality. Using Compressor.io is very simple. Just select your resized file from your computer to load it up and Compressor.io does its thing.
After these 2 steps, you now have the image at the exact size it appears on the page and you’ve compressed it to its’ tiniest possible size. Just download this compressed version of your image to wherever you need it to be on your computer.
As a note—I try to append the title of the image, so as you go along you know which files have already been resized and compressed. For example, if original file is “portait-01.png” then the processed file could be “portait-01-tiny.png”
Rinse and Repeat
Your final step is to go to your web site editor, upload the newly optimized image and place it on your page. When you do this for all the images on a page you are decreasing the page load time very significantly. This improves the visitor’s user experience which Google loves, which increases your rankings, which makes your more visible, which makes you more money!
And Google’s UX update most likely has dropped in May of 2021 by the time you read this article, so again I feel this work is time well spent for something that’s so simple to do. If this stuff isn’t your cup of tea, just give both parts of this article to a VA and they’ll have a ready-made instruction manual.
Related Reading
If you want to geek out on this topic, here’s a primer on User Experience (UX) which is an important ranking factor for all web sites (including yours).
Conclusion
I’ve said it enough but one last time; the time it takes your page to load is an extremely significant factor in how many visitors remain on your site. And that user experience (UX) is a very significant factor in how Google ranks your pages. So be a good Doobie and get this done—it’s easy to do and it’s free. Why wouldn’t you do it?
Written by Jack Pinard of Summit Buys Houses