Optimizing Images and Documents for the Web

Author:
Art Williams
Art WilliamsPrincipal / Chief Information Officer
Optimizing Images & Documents

The loading speed of your website is one of the most important factors toward its success. Since loading speed directly impacts search engine ranking & site visitor satisfaction, it will have a compounded effect on conversions. That should be reason enough for any site owner to spend the time improving load times.

There are a variety of ways to make optimizations at the server level, but one of the biggest impacts to site performance is, surprisingly, squarely in the hands of the CMS content managers in the form of file size optimization. Images and documents that are uploaded into the site and then need to be downloaded by the site visitor can bring the page loading to a halt if not properly optimized.

Below are some easy tips for optimizing a variety of file types that any content manager can use before uploading files to your CMS:

PNG and JPG Images

Our favorite online compression tool for .png and .jpg images is TinyPNG.com. It is amazing how much it can compress the image size with little to no loss of quality. We’ve even incorporated this tool into our development processes. But as a content manager, you can use the website to optimize your images before uploading them to your website.

PDF Files

In Acrobat Pro, there is a way to save a PDF using PDF Optimizer, which provides many options for reducing the resulting file size. Adobe has a detailed article about the options.

For a no-fuss, easy PDF optimization online, Small PDF gets the job done and is secure and free to use.

Microsoft Office Files - DOC XLS and PPT

Here are some nice guides for reducing your file size coming from Microsoft Office 2016 applications:\

But if you would rather not have to learn a bunch application tricks and you don’t mind letting automated tools monkey with your file, then WeCompress.com is a great online optimizer for Microsoft Office files.

Bonus Tip: WeCompress.com also optimizes .png .tiff and .jpg files but, in our testing, it is not as fast nor does it result in files as small as tinypng.com.

SVG Images

As a content editor you may not have much need for .svg files, but then again they are becoming more and more popular as an image format. An .svg file is a vector format, usually has small file sizes, and is easy to manipulate with code making it a favorite for developers, especially for logos and other non-photographic images. If you run into this kind of file and want to further optimize it we’ve had good results with SVGMinify.com. Don’t expect the files to reduce as dramatically as other image formats, but every little bit helps.

A Big Win

A site with optimized images should be noticeably faster than a site without. This is a big win in the website speed game without a lot of effort. Remember to keep up with it as new content is added, and you’ll be on your way to a better user experience and likely higher search engine rankings.

Read more about Texas Creative’s search engine optimization tips below:
How To Optimize Your Social Video Ads
3 Tips For A Better Blog
Is Facebook Worth Your Advertising Dollars?