Beware of Big Pictures in Your Blog Posts

[price engines]

Hi All.

Just a little point but one worth sharing.

Whilst it's always nice to illustrate a blog article with a nice picture (a picture paints a thousand words right?), a word of caution.

Try to resize your images to fit, rather than just uploading the illustration and letting the blogging platform work out the size.

e.g - I try to keep my images to around 300px wide. This is big enough. If you let the blogging platform dictate the size, it will still register as a large file size - it just doesn't show it.

Large images slow up page loading times considerably. OK so with many home-users now on Broadband, it's not like it used to be when the world was on dial up accounts but a few still are! (my mum being one of them).

If we are to believe Google is going to start weighting sites based on their page load times / overall homepage file size, then cutting down will only give you 'brownie points'.

I fact I write several posts without any illustration at all.

Worth a go anyway.

Jonathan.

 

[djbaxter]

If we are to believe Google is going to start weighting sites based on their page load times / overall homepage file size

I'm not sure there's any real evidence to indicate that's true but you still want to minimize page load times. Evcen those with high speed connections aren't going to wait around for a slow page to finish loading... the faster your internet connection, the more you expect "instant oage loads". And the last thing you want to do is annoy a potential customer.

 

[price engines]

Hi Minstrel

If web owners asked themselves when was the last time they got impatient with a website loading time, they might pay a little more attention to their own don't you think?

I've seen 3 column blogs with so many links and widgets in the two side bars that it's reduced loading to a crawl.

Jonathan.

 

[djbaxter]

I agree totally.

 

[gamesrebel]

Yeah minimizing page load times is important. And big pictures means that our pages take long time to load both in front of our visitors and for search engines as well. So I bet that everyone has to resize their picture to make sure that it loads quickly.

 

[Bill7194]

It's always a good idea to give yourself as much control over the appearance of content as possible. Ugly and slow loading content doesn't give a good impression to the viewer.

 

[price engines]

Hi Gamesrebel and Bill7194 - thanks for stopping by.

With regards image sizes, it's also important to understand that if you're using a 300 x 200 pixel size image in a web design, then create an image to that size before you upload it. Otherwise, your design will still be calling up a larger image file size to fit that particular space.

Jonathan.

 

[MattMcWilliams]

Also, while it is easy to just hotlink to another site's image and resize it, it is always better to save it, resize it, then upload it to your server so you are not dependent on their server or loading a large image that ends up looking like crap anyway.

What is dialup?

 

[NextDayFlyrs]

Yeah this is a good point i just moved to a slower internet connection and now i find it hard to load a lot of these link bait type posts with lots of images or big images.

 

[bryanfuller]

yes, you are right.

 

[Pablo00]

ddint though about that

 

[Affiliaria]

Thanks for bumping, Pablo! I was wondering what it meant that my page loaded because of image size in All In One SEO tool I use... will reduce the image sizes now

 

[T J Tutor]

reduce the image sizes now

It is important to note that image size can be interpreted two ways.
1. File Size
2. Image Dimension

Don't confuse the two. You can maintain image dimensions while reducing the file size of the image.

 

[Sanreans]

I insert large images, but I also compress them so they weigh less and load faster.