The Importance of Streamlining your graphics

One of the worse things that can happen to you as a webmaster is to do all the hard work get a link with a description of your webpage or website somewhere have a visitor be interested, click on your site then......

then he or she waits too long for the graphics to load up and clicks away before your site even loads! This is the absolute worst thing because you had a visitor and lost him. One of the biggest reasons for this to happen is that your webpage is too big. It takes too long for the graphics to load and in this load time the web visitor got impatient and clicked away.

You have to be sensitive to this issue and always watch the size of your webpage. Some of my webpages get pretty big and I do my best to streamline them as much as possible. What I do is to use a graphics program to reduce the image sizes.

I use Paint Shop Pro to go over my images and optimize them. Paint Shop Pro has a tool called an Optimizer and what it does is trim down the amount of storage space a graphic takes up. For example I can take an image that is originally 20k in size and optimize it down to 5k or less.

The beautiful thing about the Paint Shop Pro Optimizer is that you can scale the optimization and see how it looks. For Example: You can scale the picture down to half its size and take a look at it. If it still looks good you can scale it down some more and take another look at it.

I continually scale it down as far as I can go while insuring the picture still looks good.

How small should your webpages be?

The typical answer is as small as you can get them. I know this is kind of vague but every webpage is different. This webpage is approximately 17k in size and it should load pretty quickly. If your webpage is going over 35k or so you should think about how you can make it smaller. Optimize the graphics, leave some graphics out or trim the graphics down to a smaller size.

As always, you should view your webpages from your own browser, Be sure to clear your history so the page will load just as it would for a visitor that has come the first time. If it takes more than two or three seconds to load you probably need to optimize your graphics.

 

 

 

 

 


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