Images are the most bandwidth consuming resources on any website and even on a single page, then can contribute to 80% of the data usage. Also, other resources such as CSS & Javascript might be common on all pages but images do differ. Companies tend to use different graphics on different pages as per the page content and it makes it crucial to deliver images strategically so that your website loads fast on any network and on any device. Also, if your website has huge number of images, then taking a proper action and with a good plan, the bandwidth consumption can be reduced drastically.
Make Website Load Faster
Image Optimization
Images consume the highest bandwidth on a Web Page : Optimize & Deliver Method
Boost Website Load Speed by Optimizing Image Delivery
Different Ways to Improve Image Delivery
We have multiple ways to improve website speed, reducing image resource utilization is one of the major item that if worked on, can show huge improvements and can also help your website to rank better in Search Engines due to the improved loading times.
We will discuss a few important image delivery strategies that will allow your users to surf your website faster and smarter.
Reducing Image File Size
This is one of the areas that you can work on and will have major size reductions. We have seen businesses and even many web development companies that do not optimize images for the web and upload the images straight from the camera or the full size image version of the purchased stock image. This causes tons on wasted MBs of data to display an image inside a thumbnail size container. The smart choice would be resizing the image for the target container size thus massively reducing bandwidth usage by an image resource.
Browser Caching
Caching Images in Browser allows reducing bandwidth consumption on repeated requests. Some of the image resources such as icons, logos, and other may be repeated loaded by the visitor on each page load. By enabling browser caching, such as via htaccess file on apache servers, we can tell the browser to cache the resource locally on the users system and to load it from there if re-requested. This technique is also highly advantageous when using on resources such as css & js files.
Lazy Loading Images
One of our favorite and can help reduce the website connections on page load, thus improving website speed by many factor. By enabling lazy load feature, you are telling browser to load the images only when in viewport visibility. If the user visits one of your web page but does not scroll to the end of the page, then the images from the header will only be loaded thus saving a lot of valuable resources. Also by enabling lazy loading, some of the non-optimized images can also be loaded when requested by users browser. If your website has huge amount of images and you are not willing to go through each one and upload an optimized one, lazy load is a big saver.
CDN Caching
Another one of Zycoon Media’s top list, CDN caching of resources which not only saves your hosting bandwidth, but also helps you protect your website from massive spikes in downloading activity. If you have tons of heavy files including videos, a CDN can offload the transfer by caching the resources on its servers and sending it from its cache to the user when requested thus effectively acting as a middle man handling data without the need of repeatedly requesting the resource from your server.
Let us know your thought and if you need any assistance, Zycoon Media is just a call away. You can alternatively submit our contact form to get in touch.