Image Size and Site Effectiveness

It’s know that site load time is a factor that Google considers when setting search engine results position. But beyond that, if your site is slow to load you’re not serving your visitors well, and they may depart before they’ve seen any of your careful, well thought out design. Site load matters, and it matters a lot. If you have a broadband connection, the first page of your site should load in three seconds.

What Causes Slow Site Load

It’s always possible that your site is hosted on a server that’s over-busy. That’s between you and your hosting provider. There are other possible causes that we won’t talk about here. But far and away the greatest cause of slow site loading is the size of the images you’re downloading. This is usually the cause of slow loads that I see.

Flogging the Webmaster

Don’t blame your Webmaster. Webmasters tend to come from one or the other place–from design, in which case you get beauty but you may not get speed, or programming, in which case you will get more speed than beauty. If you’re in the former group, you’re lucky because you have a good-looking site that now can be speeded up. Your friend who has the ugly, fast site is stuck. In my experience, Webmasters often may not pay attention to site load time. So caveat emptor!

Fixing the Problem

Site design tools commonly provide tools for reducing the size of images. To solve the problem without spending any money, there’s a free service that will reduce the size of your images while preserving the resolution, called Jpegmini. It’s easy to use, and completely free.