Optimizing your Images for your WordPress Post of Page

Contributing Writer: Sabine Sharp – Glendale Designs, Glendale Arizona

You may have already written your article and would like to insert an image or two. Images are a great way to enhance your articles.  But before you just insert this image into your post you need to optimize the image for faster load time and reduce the file size. When a site is graphic heavy, it will take longer to load. In turn your site visitors might not wait around.

Matt Cutts recently released an article dated April 9, 2010 regarding Google’s strategy to Incorporating Site Speed In Search Rankings.  Overall, images need to be optimized to assist your site’s performance.

There are many software programs that can help you accomplish this simple task, here are a few of them:

PhotoShop – priced around $700 – this is a full well rounded image creation, photo editing software.  If you are not planning on doing a lot of editing, this might be more then you will need.

Adobe also offers a program called PhotoShop Elements 8, priced around $99.  Right now they have a special on this:  “Buy now and save US$30. Only US$69.99 after US$10 instant discount plus US$20 mail-in rebate.  Offer ends May 10, 2010.”  This software program will allow you to edit images, re-size them to your specification as well as optimize them for the web.

Realsoft offers a smaller program called ReaCompressor 2.0 priced around $30, which seems to also get the job done.

Another solution would be to use an on-line image optimization tool.  Once you have created your image and adjusted the dimensions you can go here and upload the file.  It will give you  some optimized images as a result and you can just right click and save the one’s you want.

So – the more you are willing to pay, the more flexibility you will have in creating  images for your projects.

The goal here is to have the image size as low as possible without distortion.  A quick way to see the file size is to right click on the image on your computer, under general look at “size” it should have a low number in Kilobytes such as 23.7 KB.   But again, this number can rise in order to retain the quality of the image you are presenting.