You have a beautiful blog full of fantastic images, but how can you keep those images from slowing down your site? Today, I am going to teach you why image compression matters and the best ways to compress your images for FREE!
Go ahead and pin this image! You’ll want to be able to find this easily.
Blogging for Beginners: 5 Reasons Image Compression Matters!
Faster Page Load Times
The most obvious reason is your site will load faster! Smaller images require less for your browser to render before it displays your incredible content.
Better Search Ranking
To wait for your site to load patiently may not seem like a huge issue, but it is! Google now give preferences to sites that load faster! You work hard to create great content so do not allow it to place lower in search results because you are not compressing your images.
Happier Readers
Even if you blog as a hobby, your goal is to still appeal to your readers. And, blog readers today expect… if not demand a site that loads quickly!
Users will NOT wait for your images to load… In fact, most users now expect a site to load in 1-3 seconds. They have more important things to do than to patiently wait for your site to load.
“The Need for Mobile Speed”, found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. – DoubleClick by Google
Higher Ad Revenues
Ad income is based on several factors, but usually, the happier the user is on your site will equal more revenue for you. You want readers to stay and click through your site. And, if the first page they clicked on loads slow they will NOT click another page!
When they abandon your site quickly, your ads will not load correctly! Plus, you will not get a chance to earn that valuable click income.
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Cheaper Hosting Fees
While some hosting companies charge per user visits, others base their price on the size of your site. Larger images will take more space to store, and quickly eat up the storage on smaller plans. And, there is no sense wasting money by bloating your storage with large images!
How to Compress Your Blog Images for Free!
Here at the IBA, we use TinyPNG to compress our images! It is free up to for up to 20 graphics of 5mb for each batch you upload.
How Does TinyPNG Work?
TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size! – TinyPNG
So by decreasing the numbers of colors, it can make your images 70% smaller! It also removes all unnecessary metadata. All this leads to smaller images with no loss of quality!
It is also effortless to use! All you need to do is upload your images then download the compressed file.
How Much Does Image Compression Save IBA?
For IBA’s last post on Apps for Positivity, TinyPNG saved us 76% at 2 MB space!
TinyPNG does have a WordPress plugin, but we have not tested it. Bonus Tip: If you compress your images before uploading you will not need to install any extra plugins on your site.
How to Fix Old Images?
I love to Imagify! It will fix up to 25MB per month, or you can upgrade to a paid plan starting $4.99 a month compress old images.
Imagify has three levels to compress your images. You can even preview a picture to help you decide on which one to use. I find their Aggressive level to work best on IBA and my blog.
As you can see below, on one image it saved 80.59%! And, on 81 files it gained 11.21 MB. WOW!!!
Let’s Talk:
Do you compress your blog images? How do you compress them? Do you have a favorite plugin or service?