WordPress SEO Optimization Techniques
Smush It, Optimizes Your Web Images Online
- Reduce your image sizes to speed up your site loading time -
I recently wrote an article about, Google, Declares that Site Speed is a Top Priority! In this blog post, I will talk about optimizing your web images to improve your site loading speed. There are quite a few free online services that you can optimize your website images from. However, this post will focus on Smush It.For most website designers and graphic designers, Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks, all do a very good job in the reduction of image file sizes. However, Smush It can squeeze a lot more out of your images. The results are smaller file sizes and that will help you to speed up your site loading speed. Smush It, does a very good job on JPG, GIF and PNG images, even if they are one megabyte in file size.
Smush It utilizes an optimization method that is imaging specific, which enables it to remove bytes from the image that aren't necessary. Basically, it optimizes the image and doesn't change the visual quality of the image. It is referred to as a "lossless tool."
Let's take a little trip over to Smush It, and upload an image.
I have uploaded a basic web graphic and let Smush It, do it's magic. Let's take a look at the results.
- - As you can see, I have achieved over 12% savings in file size reduction. Furthermore, this image had previously been compressed with Photoshop. Now, let's take a look at the two images side by side. - -
Original image Smush It image 
There you go, 12% reduction and the image still looks great when in comparison to the original.
I have used Smush It on a couple of my bigger sites, and it improved my site loading time almost by 1/2 of a second. That is pretty amazing for 10 minutes of work, using the Smush It Tool.
For those of you that use WordPress, there is a Smush It plugin. It will allow you to Smush all of your images in your WordPress media library. So, what are you waiting for, it is time to Smush It!
Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "Smush It, Optimizes Your Web Images Online"
Spunky Jones.
