A real-world example of speeding up your site

After yesterday’s post on Speeding up your website I decided why not see what we can do on a customer site.

So I ended up taking a look at a few sites I’m the webmaster for (Yep I just said webmaster I’m old school). The Town Hall Theatre Galway struck me as a good example. Now in fairness, I did a fair bit of work on this in the past but you can always tweak things.

What struck me was it was taking over 1 second to load. Normally it’s sub one second. So I took a look at the file sizes and noted that two images were rather large. I dumped them into TinyPNG and managed to save 220KB. The knock-on effect of this small change is that I’m back down sub 1 second again. Of course, you should test at different times and different pages not to mention from different regions if possible.

So when you manage to save nearly 50% on an image just how bad is the end result.

TinyPNG Panda has saved us 45% on these two images. That’s HUGE!

Well that’s up to you to decide can you tell the difference with the two images below?

Banner The Beacon Original Image
Original Banner Image 372KB
Banner The Beacon Resized Image
Resized Banner Image 208KB

Is it a lot of work? Well writing this blog post was a lot more work. Converting the images and re-uploading them took a few minutes. At the end of the day the question is just how fast does your website need to be? Do you care? Do your users care?

BUT WAIT … There’s more. For the final bonus shot. Taking the screenshots I used on this blog post I decided to optimise them. I saved over 300KB on three images.

Resizing Images in This Post

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