The Pitfalls of High-Resolution Images for Your Website and a Solution Tailored for Small Business

While the allure of high-resolution images may be tempting, they can prove to be a double-edged sword for your website. The drawbacks associated with incorporating large image files can have a detrimental impact on user experience, page load times, and overall website performance. Images are the number one reason why websites load slowly. Even a large background image will kill a website’s load time. Everybody loves photos, and in this day and age of digital photography image sizes are getting bigger and bigger. This allows for some extremely clear photos. While high resolution photos are great for editing and printing purposes they can be detrimental to websites. Not only do they take up quite a bit of disk space on web servers, they also take forever to load.

Ellis County small businesses can address this challenge by resizing and compressing their images effectively. Rather than relying on excessively large image files, consider using image optimization tools to resize images to the appropriate dimensions without compromising quality. This not only enhances website performance but also ensures faster loading times, contributing to improved search engine rankings and a positive user experience.

Images should never be loaded directly from your digital camera or even your smartphone these days. Optimal image size is between 100kb and 700kb anything more than that and you are asking for slow page load times. To put this in perspective the average high resolution image ranges from 100000 kb to 150000kb or 10 – 15 Megabytes in layman’s terms. That is 10 to 30 times larger than the optimal size. Slow pages are not visited frequently or very long by potential customers. So how do you resize your images? The answer is before loading them to your website.

Relying on your website to resize images is not the best way to optimize your images. Often websites will create multiple copies of when resizing images. This can be bulky and a disk space hog. While it solves the problem for your page load time; it creates a separate problem of taking up room that you could be using for other things. Remember you pay for your webspace, ultimately bulky images are clutter that are costing you money every year. This is why I suggest resizing your images before uploading them to your website. This can be done with software on your computer or there are a number of sites that will do it for you. In fact I used www.imageoptimizer.net to resize the image above from 7000kb to 608kb before using it in this email. I found the website by Googling, “photo size reducer free.” It was one of many that popped up in the search results.

The bottom line is that anything displayed on your website effects your page load time – everything from background music to images used in blog posts. In order to keep your website working at the peak of performance be sure to keep those files small. For Midlothian small businesses seeking professional IT support in Ellis County, enlisting the expertise of a local IT service provider can be invaluable. The professionals at Technology Did It can guide businesses in implementing image optimization strategies tailored to their specific needs. By combining efficient image resizing techniques with expert IT support, businesses can strike a balance between visual appeal and optimal website performance.

Revised Feb 20, 2024 from the original publication July 15, 2015