In web development, the page load time has become a very important factor like never before. Previous to the era of social media most of the web sites were pretty much simple and presenting relatively less complex data. Therefore performance optimization was not so difficult task.
Today most of the websites are presenting very complex dynamic data and worst part is that a large amount of data is uploaded by users and has very less control for the webmaster. No matter how complex the data is, no matter how advanced the web technology is, there is one major performance bottleneck in any website where you have to pay very close attention.
Images consume a significant persontage of bandwidth in your server and large images slow down the page load speed making the user experience very unpleasant. As the webmaster what you can do is make the page size smaller as much as possible to solve this problem.
Quick Catch-up
- Website Performance Optimization
- Google Page Speed Online
But how far can you compress the images without compromising its quality? You can always go to Photoshop and reduce the image quality to make the web page size smaller. Of course this will reduce the page load time, but pixelated images will again deliver a bad user experience.
The solution for this problem is a lossless image compression tool which can reduce the image size without compromising its quality. Most of the great web page optimization tools come from Yahoo and this solution also comes from them with the name Smush.it.
How to Use Smush.it?
- Go to SmushIt home page.
- There you can find two image uploading options.
- You can use the uploader to upload local images or you can use URL to compress online images.
- If you use the uploader it will show you the uploading status.
- After the upload process it will automatically start compressing images.
- Finally it will give you another tab named results.
- There you can download the compress images one by one using the list down there or download entire set of images as a ZIP file.
You can use this tool to optimize static images of your website, which probably you have used to make the interface looks good. SmushIt will remove all the unnecessary data in the image to make its size smaller very carefully without affecting the visual quality.
However, there is no public API available to compress your dynamic content without manual uploading. Soon I’ll meet you with a good API which you can use in a development environment to compress images.
Tags: #Performance #Web