This Simple Hack Will Supercharge Your Web Site (and Why Should I Care?)

Yeah OK it isn’t sexy in any way I know. But it’s a little like tuning up a car that won’t start on those cold mornings—once you fix it, everything runs better.

The simple fact is the graphics and pictures you place on your web pages take time to load. And if you haven’t paid attention to them you just might be losing potential deals!

WHAAAAT? Yeah, you heard me—losing deals. But I promise the fix is easy and it pays immediate dividends.

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

Why You (Have To) Care

You don’t have to know much about your website to know that the amount of time it takes for a page to appear on a visitor’s screen is extremely important to the success of your website. How important, you say? Well, how about a quick statistic: at least 25% of visitors will abandon your site if it doesn’t load in 4 seconds!

Duuuude!? That means 1 out every 4 visitors will never stay on your site if it loads too slowly. If you need more convincing, Google is using “core web vitals” as a ranking factor and loading speed is a big piece of that ranking. So, your overall ranking could suffer as well. (Do you like showing up on page 2?)

Related Reading

If you want to dig in under the hood a little more about load times and why you absolutely must to pay attention to them, here’s a great article from Search Engine Journal that will give you much more detail.

The good news is:

I’m here to show you how to streamline every page on your site. Because the graphics on any given page are responsible for almost all of the load time. Most importantly you do not need to know anything about graphics to accomplish this. Just takes a little patience and attention to detail.

And if you’re one of those high-rollers who uses VA’s for this stuff—you can give them this tutorial and they’ll get it right. If you follow each step through this quick tutorial, you’ll streamline your page’s load times—guaranteed.

Let’s Do It

Okay? Enough said—let’s get going. I wanted to show you guys a hack that I found for optimizing your graphics on any given page. Essentially, you’re running a quick scan of the page and then you‘re taking that information to scale every graphic on the page to the exact size it appears and making it as small as possible. This way you are presenting each visitor (meaning potential deal) to that page with totally the absolute fastest load time possible.

Testing 1,2,3

First you want to run a test of the specific page you want to optimize. Go directly to WebPage Test.  Here I put in my homepage address and hit” Start Test”.

When that test is done, it gives you a lot of very interesting information. If you want to geek out feel free. But the thing I want to focus on right now is across the top bar in the upper part of the screen. You can see there’s a tab called “image analysis”.

Click on that tab. This is where the magic is! (I know-I’m getting a little too excited) This tab will show all the images that you have on the tested page. If you click “see more” it then it gives you a score on how correct the size of the image is and how much load time you can save by compressing it.

In the example image, it says that I could save close to fifty percent if I resize and compress this image the right way.  Bottom line is I can go back, resize this image to that exact size shown and know that I’m carrying no extra weight by loading an image that is actually too big for the spot it has in my page.  

So now simple take note of the “ideal image size” that the test shows you for each of the images on the page.

Keep these handy because this is where we’ll pick up in part 2 of our work. Which will be published in a few weeks. If you find it easier to follow a video along for this, you can watch a video demo here.

The key takeaway here is that even if you’re not that familiar with graphics or load times, this little hack tells you exactly what size each graphic needs to be! If the images you’re putting on the page are any bigger than this you are slowing your visitors down. And 25% will leave if it takes more than a few seconds to load‑remember? So, just do this‑it’s worth it.

 This is part 1 of a 2 part article. Next installment coming soon!

Written by Jack Pinard of Summit Buys Houses