Image Size for SEO

[pauledwards]

Hi there I have a website which has some png images on pages, around 300kb - is this too much?

How many kbs a page, to what extent do you know does Google care about page load speed? is every kb important, is there a limit?

Any advice much appreciated.

[KeriMorgret]

Yahoo's Smushit.it is a tool that can do some lossless compression on your images and may be of use. If you use Wordpress, there's also a smushit plugin that will compress your images on upload.

Page load speed does have an impact both for users and search engines. It's certainly something to consider.

[irvingw]

Load time is absolutely a consideration in rankings, go into you google webmaster tools account and you can see your site performance and how your load time compares to other sites on the web. Images are just one aspect of why your page load times could be considered slow but it is a factor. Get the yslow extension for firefox and that will give you some suggestions about what other changes you can make on the site to reduce load times.

I would play around with optimizing your images in photoshop and see what percentage decrease you can get away with without noticing a difference. If all of your images are roughly the same quality you can do a batch in photoshop, which is basically making an action first, for example saying shrink all images by 15% and then batch all of the images in the image folder and photoshop will shrink them all in one shot.

tutorial: http://www.pagecurve.com/tutorial.php?id=5_0_1_0

[StalkerB]

Agree with Wayne, but for reference I'll have a large, good quality image at around 70kb and a standard image at around 20 - 30kb. If I can get it in for less without it looking terrible I will.

If you have photoshop it shouldn't be much of a problem playing with the save for web setting and seeing how much you can trim off. 60% is a good standard for jpg files.

[Wayne76]

Hi Paul,

I'm not 100% on the actual "size" of the image having any negative effects. In my experience it's directly related to how well the image is optimized. Yes, load time ABSOLUTLEY has an effect on rankings, and while some will say that it's a small effect, I contend that it's an important consideration.

While Google may not give it primary consideration in their algorithm, it can drive your users away as they wait for a page to load. People are going to wait a mere second or two before they back out of a page that is not loading. So bounce rate is the factor you need to weigh with regard to image size.

Other tips to optimize your image properly include, always add height and width to the image for faster loading, always add an Alt-attribute to the IMG-tag, always add a Title-attribute to the IMG-tag, etc.

Best of luck,

W