Why Image Compression is Critical to Your Blog’s Success

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If you’re a creative blogger, you’re probably loading up your site with beautiful, styled images of your delicious dishes, your imaginative tablescapes, or your most recent fashion forays. But are you taking time to compress images before you load them onto your blog? You definitely should be. Here’s why.

Visitors will leave your blog if a page doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we’ve adjusted our expectations since the Internet first made it’s appearance? Once upon a time, we endured now unimaginable wait times accompanied by obnoxious whistling and snapping just to get online via a dial up connection. Now, we won’t wait three measly second to get that must-have recipe. That’s bad news if your site is bloated by enormous images.

Google’s algorithms expect a page to load in 1 second or less.

And if people aren’t impatient enough, Google’s even less so. When it comes to SEO algorithms, the giant presumes that any trustworthy site will be served in 1 second or less. You read that right. So there’s a chance that an image-heavy site can actually ding your SEO, making it even harder for potential visitors to find your site.

Not all of your readers have high speed connections.

While many countries have standardized high speed internet access, the United States isn’t quite there yet. In many areas of the country, internet speed is compromised by poor infrastructure or shoddy service providers. So even if your blog is loading quickly on your browser, it may be very slow on another person’s browser. While you can’t control the internet, you can make life more pleasant for your readers by keeping your pages lightweight for faster access.

Mobile download rates are still lagging behind desktop rates.

More users are finding your site via mobile, and mobile still hasn’t caught up to desktop in terms of download rates. It takes longer for mobile phones to show the images on your posts under the best of circumstances. If you haven’t compressed images, you’re not only eating up your visitors’ time, you may even be running down their monthly data plan. A considerate blogger will make sure the images selected for display on mobile devices are compressed and serve a purpose beyond taking up space.

Large files make a premium hosting account more expensive.

Free hosting accounts tend to be slower anyway, so if you’re loading your site with large images, you’re going to add to that lag. If you’re using a premium hosting account, large image files will also increase your payment plan.

For your own budget and your readers’ happiness, take time to compress those images and prevent your blog from becoming another relic of the more patient days that we’ve left in our wake.