Session: 'Website performance and best practices in image optimisation...' by Kristy Devries

DrupalSouth Gold Coast 2016

Website performance and best practices in image optimisation to improve your Google ranking
Room: Realityloop (Level 2)
Thu, 27-Oct, 13:15
Intermediate - Inventing
Kristy Devries

Both in my previous role of a web developer for an agency and my current role as support engineer for Acquia, I very often come across customers and possibly some developers, who have not been educated about the importance of having images in the right format, with the smallest file sizes without compromising on image quality and compressing images.

Summary of items I'd like to talk about;

- I have frequently seen customers run out of space on their hosting subscription due to PNG and JPG files that are 10MB - 30MB.
- Not all images need to be in PNG formats, the only images that should be in PNG format are images that require transparency
- I'd like to discuss tools you can use to bulk resize images, image compression software, methods to lower an image file size without losing image quality
- The customer could save money by resizing and optimising images instead of upsizing
- Ideally images should be 250KB, with the right format. With the exception of banner and hero images on websites there won't be many situations for inline images and content that needs to be over 1024px wide
- While a customer's website should have a great user and front end experience and great design this should not be at the mercy of a website that doesn't load due to too many large images (as well as jQuery load scripts)
- While we are getting faster internet, and computers and laptops are getting retina displays - in the future this may not be such a problem.
- Having optimised images means better performance. Better performance means a better Google ranking as Google does use page load time as a factor in their ranking algorithm. Better performance also means happier web users. Just one example of that is that Amazon found that if their pages slow down by 1 second, they lose $1.6 billion a year.