A couple of weeks ago when I was playing around with my blog I discovered that it was running VERY slowly. Page Speed wasn’t something I thought about. I know I probably should have, but my site was running OK and that was all that was important to me at the time. It wasn’t until I did a Google Page Speed Insight Test that I discovered that my blog was scoring a mere 12/100. There’s me hoping to monetize my blog this year when I can’t even get that right… Anyway, I found that this score was mainly due to my images being far too big which was having a major affect on the loading time of my blog. I managed to increase my Google Page Speed score from 12 to 60/100 just by optimising my images so I thought I’d let you know how it’s done.
*excuse the photo, I couldn’t find a single photo relating to the subject. Everyone loves sweets right?
1. Firstly, check the settings on your DSLR/Camera, mine was taking photos at around 20MP which is far, far too high to begin with. Most modern cameras will have a range of picture size settings to chose from. I’ve changed mine to 2MP. I wouldn’t recommended bigger than 4MP.
2. Then, before you insert your photos into your blog post you need to compress them. I’ve been using TinyPNG which compresses photos as much as it possibly can but retains all the quality. It’s the most user friendly method I’ve found. Simply choose the photos you want to compress, wait for it to work it’s magic, download the images then insert these as you usually would in a blog post.
3. I have also downloaded two Plugins to help with image size once they’re on my blog; WP Smush and Resize Image After Upload. WP Smush will automatically compress photos, I did find the free version wasn’t as effective as doing it prior using TinyPNG but I’ve kept it activated as it will compress photos further if it can. Resize Image After Upload lets you set a maximum pixel width and height for your photos. I have set the maximum width as 700px and left the height open (0).
These steps may seem simple to some of you, but I’m hoping they will help others like they’ve helped me. I’m constantly working on my Google Page Speed so I’ll be doing further ‘how to’ guides on how to improve other aspects. Obviously a score of 60/100 still isn’t great but these simple steps improved my score by 48 so it was most definitely worth it.
I’d love to hear if these steps have helped you and whether you’d like to see more posts like these.
Until next time,
pia says
thank you for this, I will try to use the app for squeezing files!
Fash ‘n’ fudge
Fash ‘n’ fudge