How to make your blog load quicker

Image compression tips

For those NOT using Lightroom

Many bloggers wonder how to increase their ranking on Google.

One of the best trick is to have a webpage that loads quickly, thus necessitating some small image files. Not everybody uses Lightroom, Aperture, or other editors – so here’s the how-to for Mac users using Photos or other basic apps.

I have been using the (expensive but stellar) service of Cloudinary for quite a while. It allows to host your picture on another server than my blog provider. It’s loads quicker than the Squarespace faster (or so their marketing wants to you believe;).

Sometimes I feel lazy: I don’t feel like uploading my pictures to Cloudinary and then using HTML code to make them appear in my article. And so I use a neat little program for mac called ImageOptim. It allows lossless compression.

Here’s some examples: 90% quality, 80% quality with normal optimization, 75% and 50%. The size went from 500kb to about 97kb for a version that I deem okay for web use. Anything after the 75% has too many artefacts. See for yourself. Hope you don’t mind my sister’s face.

I should mention that I always resize my pictures with Preview.

Below is an example from original to 10% to 100% quality using Cloudinary image optimization service (basically, you add “ /q_60/ “ through your html code. q for Quality and 60 for 60%. Simple.

Here, below, 100%, 50% and 30% quality settings through Cloudinary.

30% is not bad eh? And it weights nothing. A few kb…

So this was a bit a long post, but that’s the way I do it (outside of Lightroom). It is tedious work, but you have to do it when your blog reaches out 168 countries. Not everybody has optic fiber!

Cheers,
JP