So far we discussed how to prepare your working environment and selecting a good looking as well as high performance theme. There are more steps you should take towards high performance wordpress blog. Today our focus would be on how to optimize your images and videos for maximum performance.
You can find two types of images in your blog.
Optimizing images and videos in theme is one time process, but optimizing them in posts is an on going process. You must setup a proper system to get them done in a minimum time.
Roadmap
Best Practices for Image
- Use smallest possible resolution for images
- Never resize images using HTML attributes
- If you need several sizes of images, have separate physically resized copies.
- Optimize them for web using a photo editing tool
- Finally use Smushit for optimum compression.
Smallest resolution will give you smallest file size. If downsized a large image using HTML attributes, still you are using the same bandwidth. It will be slower. So have a separate actually downsized image. I’m pretty sure you have enough space in your web server.
Best Practices for Videos
- Better not to host videos unless it’s really necessary
- Host videos in 3rd party video streaming service
- Embed those videos in your blog posts. YouTube will be a good solution.
- Try not to use videos in your theme.
If you host videos in your hosting server, It will consume significant amount of bandwidth. It will be very costly. So use a 3rd party video streaming service, it’s free and highly performance optimized.
What is the Best Way to Compress Images?
- Edit your image in Adobe Photoshop.
- Set the resolution of you canvas considering original image size needed.
- Use save for web and devices
- Configure it to give the minimum possible file size
- Put it through SmushIt for further compression.
You have to keep using the same process for entire videos and images which you are going to use in your blog posts. This will decrease the web page size drastically and improve page performance significantly.
So far we optimized wordpress theme and hypermedia. Next Step would be optimizing CSS and JS.
Contact me @MalindaOnline to claim your Free Website Performance Review. I’m giving you a detailed report with identified performance bottlenecks and optimum cost effective solution.
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Tags: #Blog #Performance #SEO