Site speed is (and should be) a big deal for webmasters.
When your site loads quickly it provides a better user experience for your visitors.
The other benefit is that the speed at which a page loads is a factor in Google's ranking algorithm. If your site is slow it will very likely have a negative impact on your rankings in search engines.
One of the biggest contributors to a slow site has to do with images.
Image file sizes tend to be large even if the image is compressed.
If you've checked out Google PageSpeed Insights recently you probably saw this opportunity (suggestion) for improvement:
"Serve images in next-gen formats"
Which you'd love to do if only you knew what that meant.
I had no idea myself but eventually figured out this refers to using images in your website that are "next generation" formats.
Instead of images that end with .jpg or .png there are new formats out there (like .webp) that make for MUCH smaller image file sizes without a loss of quality.
When your image file sizes are small your page or post loads more quickly.
However, not all browsers accept these images so you have to make a tiny modification to your website to make this work.
There are plugins out there that will do this for you but for the life of me I could not find one that didn't eventually require a monthly fee or the purchase of credits to convert images over a certain limit.
That really bothered me since I knew Google has an open source converter tool that would do this for free.
So, I hacked together my own method and WOW - the image sizes are beyond anything you've seen before. Google's right - serving next-gen images DOES make your site significantly faster!
Read my post on how you can do this for your site, too:
If you view the post with a current version of Firefox or Chrome you'll see what I mean about images not slowing you down.
That post is an excellent example of the power of these new image formats. It has 44 photos embedded within.
Despite using a caching plugin and a lazy loading plugin that post still had a load time of over 4 minutes before using next-gen images (and a massive page size of over 3MB). After converting the images it loads in under 1 and 1/2 minutes with a file size of only 936KB.
I have posts with fewer images where I've made this switch and they're loading in under 50 seconds on shared hosting. This is huge!
The post lays out step by step instructions on how I'm doing this for my sites but I'm not a techie master when it comes to this kind of thing so if someone knows how to do it more quickly and still with next to no expense I'd love to hear!
Thanks!
Sincerely,
Erica Stone
erica@extremereviewer.com
