Page load speed continues to be a primary concern for websites. With increasing numbers of customers accessing sites on mobile connections, and markets expanding into areas with uneven broadband coverage, load times have a big impact on conversion.
But “speed” can be a nebulous measure. We recommend using page weight, or the combined file sizes of every element on a page, as a proxy. Unlike speed, it’s objective, measurable and actionable. Slow because of a heavy page? Find the heaviest elements and try to shrink them.
Images are often up to 70 percent of a page by weight. That means image optimization is usually an easy win. Yet it’s not always easy to know where to start. Last year, we launched Page Weight, a tool designed to guide you to your worst-performing images quickly and provide straightforward optimization suggestions. Today, based on feedback from users, we’re launching an improved version that makes picking that low-hanging fruit even easier.
Enter your URL into Page Weight, and imgix will prepare a custom report that points out where poorly-optimized images are adding unnecessary bulk and slowing your page down. The report shows what these images would look like with best-practice image processing applied to them through imgix, and shows you the potential page weight savings per image, starting with the worst offenders.
There are many ways to evaluate page speed overall, but Page Weight’s focus on images gives developers a clear path toward improvement without a lot of additional analysis required. However, it can also complement other tools that measure speed more holistically. If those tools indicate that your images are a major issue, you can use Page Weight to look more granularly at how to optimize them.
Regardless of your reason for optimizing images, page weight matters, and the free Page Weight tool is a great place to start figuring out your approach. Try it out and your site will be loading faster in no time.
