Is there a sweet spot for compressing images for load speed?
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i am looking to improve the load speed on my site (it's very poor at the moment) but I am trying to figure out how much I should compress the images on my page by. Is there a sweet spot between making the images as small as possible without losing image quality. I know that this might differ depending on a number of factors by any advice would be very helpful. Thanks
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I cannot speak to a 'sweet spot' specifically but I would recommend Google's Pagespeed Insights tool for this, you can export optimized/compressed images (as well as CSS and Javascript files) for the page you are analyzing.
I've used this method for many clients and have seen improvements in page load time and have never noticed a difference in image quality.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any follow up questions!
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Doing it in bulk, I would use: http://nikkhokkho.sourceforge.net/static.php?page=FileOptimizer
Unless you're on wordpress, where I would use something like https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/ or https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
On most of these, you can select "Lossless" or "Lossy". One doesn't lose any quality of the image and lossy loses slight image quality.
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Agree with George above. Also http://pixlr.com/editor/ is a great free tool for compressing images. To answer your question of a "sweet spot", you want to compress them as much as possible while still looking ok on your website. You may just have to test out uploading it on your website and make sure it looks good as a header image is going to be different from a logo image, etc.
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I use https://tinypng.com/ it is a great tool for image compression.
alternatively I would use CTR+ALT+SHIFT+S on photoshop to save as png/jpeg for web. It does a hell of a compression (no quality damage).
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