Image Compression is Everything
As a web developer you must be knowledgable in making your content available across platforms. Having your site function and look great no matter the screen viewing it is going to be the difference between a successful app or not. When I first started learning web development the focus was on desktop and while that is great to learn, you quickly figure out that developing your site for mobile is just as important. Besides the obvious screen size difference, there is also a large difference in processing power between platforms. This means that something simple like a page of full resolution images can take way longer on a mobile device over wifi to download and display, making your site basically unusable due to loading times.
The most amazing thing about image compression is that the images are indistinguishable from the original, larger size when viewed on mobile devices. This means that there isn’t really a downside to compressing images to view on mobile devices and it will only make your site load faster! In todays world having a website that loads quickly is just as important as having a website at all. If I go to a restaurants website on my phone to view their menu and it takes 20 seconds to load because of a gallery of full resolution food photos, i’ll probably just leave the site to look elsewhere. Today the internet is synonymous with near instant gratification and access of information so anything that takes too long to load will only annoy people trying to view your site.
One of the most straight forward ways to compress images is with an already widely used tool, Adobe Photoshop. This is the method that I have most commonly used so far because usually i’m already resizing and editing the images in Photoshop. The easiest way to do this is in the “Save as…” menu when saving any image. Photoshop gives you an image quality scale from 1–10 with 10 being original quality. Simply select 5 for example and right away the image size is drastically reduced and you won’t be able to tell the difference when looking at the image.
Conclusion
Today image compression is a vital part of building any app being hosted on the web. Because people usually use websites to view quick information, they don’t have all day to sit there and wait for your site to load. There is no reason to display a full resolution 4k image on a mobile website for example and image compression will give you a lot more to work with in file size. Compress your images, improve overall load times of your website, and succeed!
Sterling Holt is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to (Final Project) in the (DGM 2341 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
