It is important that your web page loads as quickly as possible for visitors. Page load time is also a ranking factor Google uses to prioritise faster-loading websites, so it is important to have your images be as small as possible.
This is the top area I see needed when trying to optimise a page for Google PageSpeed Insights.
Please see the video and complete transcript below.
Use the free Pixlr X software at https://pixlr.com/.
For images that span the entire width of a page, use around 1,280 pixels wide. For images to include as a post feature image or just to have on a page, make them as small as the largest size needed, which is usually no more than 700 pixels wide. Adjust the size as needed then save and get it well under 100 KB as shown in the video.
Video Transcript – How to Optimise an image for the web using Pixlr
0:00
In this video, I’m going to show you how to optimize an image to use on your website. So I’m gonna start with this image I’ve got here on my desktop, and you can see I’m open to the site, PIXLR.
0:15
You’ll wanna go to pixlr.com. This image I’ve got here is quite large. It’s 6.17 megabytes way too big to put on the web. It’s gonna slow down my webpage. So I wanna get it to as small size as possible without losing quality to display nicely.
0:35
So I’m going to select this starter design project with their X option. This is their quick and easy design software, and it’s all free. I’ve clicked on that X option. And now I need to open the image. I can either click this button to open it, or I can just take my image and drag it right into my browser, right onto that option.
1:01
I’ve got the three options here for the website I’m gonna select web. And what that’s going to do is set, on a width of a max 1280. So it’s gonna shrink that down. It’s gonna keep the aspect ratio of my image, but it’s going to make the width, down to 1280, which is fine. That’ll be display nicely. Now all I have to do, there’s my image. All I have to do is click save.
1:27
So I click save and what I’d like to do if I was to hit save. Now you can see the qualities set to 90%, and that would give me an image size as shown here as 1, 1 73 kilobytes that’s okay, but I’d like to get it under a hundred K if I can. So what I’m gonna do is slide this quality slider down to where that number gets under a hundred. I’m gonna keep going. I’m almost there, almost there, and there we go. So I’ve got it 74% and that’s showing now at 98.1 kilobytes. Fantastic. I’m gonna click save as keeping it in the same JPEG format. I’m gonna rename this. So I don’t write over my existing image. I’m gonna just put dash web on the end and it’s that simple. I’ve just created another image that I can now use on my website. That’s only 98 kilobytes at 1280, from 6.17 megabytes, uh, very handy tool. And I hope you use it. Thank you…
