One of the top reasons for a slow blog or website is the size of the images it needs load. In the video tutorial below I will go over some information about where to find images for your blog, why you need to optimize them and also show you exactly where and how you can do this.
There are several options to go with so you decide which fits your process best. Having well optimized and properly sized images not only makes your blog look good, but it helps it load much faster for your viewers. Under the video you can find links to all the resources I go over.
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VIDEO RESOURCES
Make sure you watch the video for detailed how to instructions 🙂. Note some of the below are affiliate links. For more information on how I use affiliate links, click here.
- Pixabay (free images), or Adobe Stock (not free, 10 free images). Or search Google images with a FILTERED “usage rights” options selected.
- PicMonkey (free option)
- WP Smush plugin for WordPress (free option)
- TinyPng (free option)
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IN SUMMARY:
Improve the speed of your blog by always using the right image sizes according to where you are placing them on your blog. Find images from the places above (or any other place you wish), take image into PicMonkey and resize it down. If you need to get it even smaller in size, I recommend uploading it to tinypng and compressing it there, or add WP Smush plugin to your WordPress blog.
Images from your cell phone are typically WAY too big to use on your blog and I highly encourage you to follow the process to resize them first. Images can seriously drag down your blog so if you must, remove and replace old big images with new ones. You should see a great performance improvement. Anything over 200KB should be resized. No image over 1MB should ever be added, or at least is advised against in most cases.
Hope you found the video useful. It does have greater detail and instructions on how to do all this!
I'm Aymee. I am a web designer, author, and SEO connoisseur. Ready to learn? Welcome to my blog!
Thanks for the info Aymee! I have a lot to learn and these tips were great!
Great Nancy, thank you for stopping by!
Great information! I struggle with sizing on images and this will help tremendously.
Thanks Annett, this is definitely one of the big performance impacts to a blog. Glad it will help!
I use Squarespace which auto sizes all images so that is a huge help but lots of great info here for all the WordPress whizzes out there!
WordPress also produces 5-7 different image sizes of the one you upload to fit different scenarios (sometimes more depending on the Theme you are using). However, neither platform will ‘compress’ the size (not the dimensions) automatically (without manual help or a plugin), and so it is always best to do this prior to uploading, at least for those huge images I mention in the video. Re-sizing the dimensions of an image does help, but sometimes, it is not enough. That said, I am not a Squarespace designer, just sharing from experience in general. Thanks for stopping by April :-)!
valuable tips! Thanks Aymee!