Professional Website Graphics Optimization Techniques

Optimizing graphics for the web is a vital part of web development and maintenance, but also something often overlooked by webmasters. The time your page takes to load is something you ought to obviously worry about. This is because failure to properly optimize your website will make it take too long to load. This might eventually affect its position on the search engines or refuse visitors from visiting your site. In fact, it doesn’t matter if the layout is nice and beautiful if it doesn’t function properly. Website graphics can be pretty heavy, so optimizing graphics is certainly an issue that you should keep your eye on. There are several image editing and manipulation applications, tools, and programs that can be used for website optimization.

  

1. Blur background for optimized JPEGs

Background blurring reduces higher frequency details for more efficient JPEG algorithms. Blurring reduces the weight and smoothens out abrupt tonal and color transitions of the JPEG images. Opting to blur images is very vital as it reduces non-critical details while ensuring that your image as a whole is not affected. Remember that the amount of savings entirely depends on the amount of blurring. The less detail there is in an image, the more efficient the compression. Additionally, converting to Lab Color mode allows you to maximize blur for minimum file size.

  

2. Convert Graphic Text for CSS Text

A graphic text is one that has been pixelated in stone in a graphic design program such as Photoshop. While graphic text allows you to use any font face, it has its own disadvantages. These include, but not limited to more HTTP requests, poor accessibility, slower downloads, lower SEO ranking and higher maintenance costs. Therefore, converting graphic text to CSS text is an effective way to carry out a smooth website speed optimization. It is a common habit for most people, when working on a graphic image for something like an ad, a poster, or sign, to concentrate on the image itself. But, it is wise to note that the text on the graphic is what actually conveys the message that you want to relate. You should, therefore, ensure that the type of text you decide to use is as impressive as possible.

3. Influence Histograms

Histogram influencing can be used to minimize banding in GIFs and PNGs. This can be done by weighting color palettes directly towards the problem areas. Any time you index to an adaptive palette, Photoshop normally creates a histogram of the colors in your image, ranked by popularity. It then uses this histogram to determine how much weight to give particular colors in the resulting palette. In fact this method is known to work perfectly with simple images. However, for more complex images, choice of color palette by Photoshop may be less than optimal.

  

4. Lossy Compression for Smaller GIFs and JPEGs

Lossy compression involves altering or pre-filtering an image for better compression. It is used to create smaller files by eliminating or discarding or losing some of the information about the original image. It is used to remove details and any changes in color that it deems too small for the human eye to differentiate. It is because of lossy compression that makes JPEGs to appear totally different from the original image.

  

5. Minimize Dithering in GIFs and PNGs

Dithering involves changing pixels in color transition zones of web graphics to minimize banding. It works by changing pixels along the edges of color in an image so as to minimize banding or reduce contrast between neighboring colors. This process strategically places patterns of available colors to emulate colors eliminated in the color quantization process. Dithering works similarly with feathering in that it makes the resulting image appear smoother. 

6. Weighted Optimization for Regional Compression

Weighted optimization for regional compression applies a varying range of degrees of compression to different areas of your image. This helps you vary the quality within images so at to improve file size. You can use dithering settings to different areas of your image and alpha masks to apply different GIF/PNG lossy and JPEG quality.

Contact Website Optimization to learn more about graphics optimization.

Website Optimization
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