Optimize images for your WordPress blog

Images we use take a lot of memory and increases page load time too. Following these simple tips getting your images that do not occupy more space than strictly necessary. You can make images larger than 2 MB less than 100 kb of size and will look perfect.

We just need a photo editing program, in this trick we will discuss two most used softwares: Photoshop for advanced users and Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows bundled. Basically you have to do is:

• Reduce the physical size of the image, the smaller, less space occupied.
• Set the quality for web.

Microsoft Paint

If you have Windows operating system, this is an image editor that comes default. The big advantage we have is that almost everyone has the great disadvantage that offers far fewer options than other publishers. We will use an enormous photo of 17 MB size to demonstrate :

Resize: Just go to the top menu, select image and then resize. Choose what size you want your photo to be in centimeters or percentage:

Resolution for Web: Go to top menu > properties, and make sure the photo is at a less resolution:

End result:

The photo became of 92 KB:

Photoshop

It is probably the best image editor in the market. Here are some tips:

Resize: Just go to the top menu, select “Image”, then “image size” and then select the size that suits you.

Web-resolution: You must click “file” and then “save for web” will open a window with several options, choose the one that best suits you, choose the quality. Then you choose where to save, and you is.

Note: Always try to save as jpg in paint. It will save lot of space. In Photoshop; save as jpg, and you will get lot of option to compress more. Medium quality often looks nice with smaller file size.

Online tool to compress more : Yahoo Smush it

Now, we will use Yahoo Smush it service to compress the above image more. After uploading and later downloading, it became 83 KB:

There are many advanced tool to reduce the size of images; but we use these three tools to reduce the sizes, which are quite good for us.