□ The rest of you are probably sighing over the fact that I am about to mention yet another thing that you must contend with. Optimize Images for Retina Screens:īut what about retina displays? In my mind’s eye, I can see some of you are pointing your finger in my face as you wag it in disagreement. Using larger images will just drag your site speed down. It will only display as 300px and never larger. It doesn’t make much sense to upload a bio image that is 2000px wide. Now, let’s say that your sidebar has a maximum width of 300px. So, when we place things side-by-side, such as the content area and the sidebar, they must share that maximum container space. Just like those small boxes placed inside the larger box, you can arrange them in different positions, but they can never expand beyond the larger container. These smaller boxes would be your header, footer, sidebar, and content area. Think of it as one large box with several smaller boxes placed inside. Within that main container, there will be even smaller, nested, containers with their own limits to size. Even though the container will shrink to fit smaller devices, it will never appear larger than those maximums. What this means is that when the theme is viewed on at a screen resolution (not to be confused with rendered resolution) more than 1024px, the space beyond the 1024px will be white space or whatever background color you have assigned. This size can vary, but for the sake of this post, let’s pretend that all themes are set to this size. Each theme has a maximum container width or a point at which it will not expand any larger. To help you better understand how a site works, think about this. So, images within my content area will never appear more than about 600px wide. However, I also have margins and padding to consider. In my case, my themes content area maxes out at 700px. Make sure that you resize your images down to no more than the maximum size that you will be using. Back when I started my first blog, I had no clue about the importance of this and was uploading super large images to my site.ĭon’t do what I did. If you have been doing this, don’t beat yourself up about it. It is unnecessary, and you will pay a heavy tax on your load times. ![]() Don’t be one of those people who uploads an image that is 4000 pixels wide. This is the first step in shrinking down the file’s size. To begin to optimize images with Photoshop, I always start by resizing them. How to Optimize Images with Photoshop: Physical Size Sizing Images This post will likely be penalized for being so large and will not rank as high as it could. Because page speed is just that – per page. This is not going to be a pleasant experience for anyone.Īnd, even if they restrict their usage of heavy files to just this one page, they are still hurting themselves. If they gain a regular viewership, which I imagine would be the goal, they could have hundreds of thousands of people trying to view multiple pages that have massive file sizes. Take a moment to imagine what will happen if they continue to upload images of this size. And that is before anything else is taking into consideration. If you use just this one image on a page, you have already doubled the recommendation set by the Google gods. Yes, a server can handle many 1MB images, but just because it can doesn’t mean it should. Obviously, this person was giving out bad advice and was not knowledgable about SEO. One person stated that they “shouldn’t worry about it” and if a server couldn’t handle a 1MB image they should “get a new service”. The issue was that their image was over 1MB, and they only knew that it shouldn’t be. I once came across a comment in a Facebook group where someone was asking about optimizing an image. They either are completely unaware that such a thing is required, or they are misinformed on how they should go about doing it. There seems to be a lot of people out there running sites without understanding the importance of image optimization. ) The General Consensus on Image Optimization If that is not enough to convince you to optimize your images, read on! (Okay, read on even if you are convinced. While most sites are not even close to these recommendations, it at least gives us a reference point to start with. In addition, Google recommends that each page on a site should be less than 500kb. ![]() Couple that with their findings that about 70% of mobile pages take at least 7 seconds to fully load. However, this can be confusing when you throw in all of the things that you must consider – theme sizes, screen sizes, and even retina displays.Īccording to Google, 53% of site visitors will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. The standard good practice for images is to use images that are no larger than the maximum size at which they will be displayed.
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