We’ve talked a few times this year about Magento’s speed and about using Pingdom tools and Google Page Speed Insights.
Slow load times often come down to lots of CSS and JavaScript, but large, beautiful images play a part too. Those big, sharp images look great, yet they also make your pages load more slowly, and an impatient visitor may simply click away. And there goes your conversion.
Some of these issues are quick to fix yourself. Here, I’d like to focus on optimizing images.
Compressing images is something you can do on your own, and the example below shows how. I ran a quick test on http://www.jpegreducer.com/ using an image that’s currently live and appears in Google’s recommendations:
The original image is 36.32 KB.
With a lower level of compression, here’s the result:
The image is now 18.44 KB (roughly 70% smaller). As you can imagine, if you do this for every image (in every store), your pages will load a lot faster.
Image optimization tools aren’t limited to online scripts. There are also programs you can install on your PC or Mac. Two examples are Fileminimizer for Windows and ImageOptim for Mac.
There are also some trickier techniques for making images load faster. When Google assesses page speed, it looks at the number of HTTP requests. The browser loads the images in your online store one by one, so fewer images mean fewer HTTP requests and a faster store. In some cases, a CSS sprite can work well: one large image that contains all your different buttons, states, and icons.
And there are plenty more technical improvements you can make to your online store. Some modules, for example, automate image compression. Setting one up takes some time, but it’s a one-off job. After that, all your images can be compressed automatically.
Have you already compressed your images? Run a quick test? Is your load time still over 2 seconds? Let us know, and together we’ll get it under 2 seconds!
