Images Compression

and Site Loading Speed

Images are often the #1 element responsible for slow page load times. By choosing the right combination of file format and images compression you can make your site a lot faster, see now how to do that.

Images can often enhance the quality of your website, and they’re key to implementing a visual marketing strategy. However, the more media-heavy your site is, the greater the impact on your loading times. If your website takes too long to load, it doesn’t matter how stunning it looks — it’ll scare visitors off.

Image compression is an excellent way to optimize your site’s loading times.

In a nutshell, compressing images involves reducing their file size so it takes up less space, and there are two methods: ‘lossy’ and ‘lossless’. The former optimizes your images drastically while potentially lowering visual quality, and the latter only compresses your files as much as possible without affecting the way they look.

You should be able to spot some differences if you zoom in close enough. However, since we’re not displaying either image at full resolution, the differences are tough to make out. Given the space constraints many websites have, there’s no reason to upload a high-quality 5MB image when a compressed 500KB version could be just as suitable.

In any case, the main benefit of image optimization is easy to understand. The less storage space your graphics take up, the lighter your pages will be. This means users will be able to load your website faster, which should have a direct impact on its usability and ‘stickiness’. With this in mind, let’s find out how much of an impact image compression really has on performance for an average website.

This page weighed in at 1.3MB, featuring the same set of unoptimized images as our earlier example — just using a different layout:

Initial Page SizeOptimized Page SizeInitial Loading TimeCompress JPEG and PNG Images ResultsWP Smush ResultsHomepage Portfolio1.3MB1MB (-23.07%)2.84 seconds2.15 seconds (-24.29%)2.45 seconds (-13.73%)Masonry Blog1.7MB1.3MB (-23.52%)1.69 seconds1.49 seconds (-11.83%)1.52 seconds (-10.05%)

There’s a lot of information to unpack here, so let’s talk about what those numbers mean.

According to our results, image optimization does have a significant impact on website loading times. To be more specific, our tests found that on average, you can expect to see an improvement of at least 10% on loading times if you optimize every image on your site.

Some of you might think that 10% is not enough to justify the hassle of compressing every single image on your website. However, there are plenty of ways to automate the process within WordPress. If you fail to do so, you’re essentially saying “No” to better performance.

Finally, it’s worth noting that 10% is at the lower end of our score results. Your gains will depend on how many images your pages include on average, and which compression tools you use. In all likelihood, your loading times will probably improve further. However, you won’t find out until you try it for yourself.

Optimizing your images is one of many ways you can reduce your website’s loading times. However, it’s often difficult to imagine just how much of an impact it can have on overall performance. In any case, WordPress offers plenty of tools you can use to optimize your images. You can even automate the process if you want to, so there’s no reason to avoid it.

During our testing, we found that images compression improved loading times around 10% in most cases. This is at the lower end of the scale, though. During testing, we saw even better results, all the way up to a 24.29% performance increase. Your own results will largely depend on how many images your pages include on average and the optimization tools you use.

Do you have any questions about which image optimization plugin you should use for WordPress? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

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