Images capture attention – they bring a post to life!
We all have fabulous cameras at our fingertips these days (hint: your smartphone), but that also bring up a problem. The images coming from your camera are too big (both in pixel sizes and file size) for your website.
If you have a sidebar, chances are you need an image that’s around 650 pixels wide. Use a pic from your cellphone and it’s going to be over 4,000 pixels wide! Number wise that might not seem like a huge difference but it is in File Size. It’s the file size that has a big impact on the load time of your site.
If you don’t resize the image before you upload it you’ll be drastically increasing the load time for your website. Your readers don’t want to wait, Google doesn’t want to wait, and it’s just not good ‘interneting’.
Here’s how to resize your images before you upload them to your WordPress website:
SIDE TRACK: That said, there’s another option out there. It’s called a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and the way it works is this. You upload any image you want, any size. The image doesn’t actually live on my server anymore. The CDN takes the original and creates multiple smaller versions of the same image and stores them all. When the reader’s web browser says, “Hey we need to display image1234 over here in this post“, the CDN sends only the proper sized version of that image to their browser.
That means when you view this on a desktop, my bike picture at the top should be 650 px wide. View the post on your smartphone and the pic the CDN sent you might only be 300 px wide. That also means the post will load much faster. It’s smart like that!
IMPORTANT: Not all CDN’s will do this and the better way, even if you have a CDN, is to always rezize your pictures first.
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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