Tricks for Speeding up a Slow Website [Classic]

Welcome to our Placester Hacks series. Placester Hacks are Placester-approved tricks and workarounds that allow you to accomplish some customizations that may not seem possible with the current toolsets included in Placester’s products. Keep in mind that these hacks are generally more advanced than standard setup instructions. We recommend only using them if you’re familiar with HTML and website editing.

This article explains simple techniques for optimizing images and various content to speed up website load times.

Main Reasons for a Slow Loading Website

High quality images and videos are eye candy and grab viewers' attention. However, the downside of this is that your pages hold large pixels and file sizes. This additional data can then increase the time it takes for the requesting browser to process these downloads, resulting in your audience waiting longer than necessary to view your site.

How to Save Images in the Proper File Format

Using the proper file format can have a drastic impact on the file size. It can be tough to know exactly which file type is the best to use. If you save your image as the wrong type, you could end up blurring a beautiful photo, losing all the detail of your logo, or turning a transparent background black.

If you’d like to know exactly which is the perfect image filetype to use for which images, and save a lot of space and bandwidth in the process while maintaining a quality image, check out the handy reference below for the facts.

JPEG:

  • JPEGs can be compressed up to 5 times (particularly helpful for speeding up slow web pages)
  • Compatible across many platforms (Mac and PC, web browsers, image editors, etc)
  • Standard file type of most digital cameras

GIF:

  • The file format that is used for small animations
  • Uses less colors, meaning the files sizes start smaller than JPEGs
  • Compression does not lose any data

PNG:

  • Best choice for web images
  • Allows for transparent and faded backgrounds (good for logos)

Image Compress and How to Apply this to Images

Image compression is minimizing the size in bytes of a graphics file without degrading the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. The reduction in file size allows more images to be stored in a given amount of disk or memory space.

A great image compression tool we recommend to use is JPEGmini. If you use the free trial, you'll be able to compress up to 20 of your images without losing quality. We recommend resizing the images in the slideshow first, but images in pages and blog posts can also affect site loading speed.

What are the Proper Size Dimensions for my Pages?

Each Placester theme has a different image ratio for the home page slideshow. You can find out the recommended dimensions for each theme here, as well as tips and resources for resizing images. Another area of the site to think about is featured images on blog posts. Again, each theme has slightly different dimensions, but we have theme guides available for all of our themes which include the dimensions here.

Need More Help? 

If you have additional questions about speeding up your website's performance, let our support team know at support@placester.com.

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