What does your website have to do with the World Cup?

It’s the most wonderful time of 2019!

No it’s not the holidays. It’s the FIFA Women’s World Cup! ⚽

So I’m a huge women’s football (soccer for us Americans) fan and I’m ecstatic that the World Cup is finally here.

What’s this got to do with optimizing your website? I’m streaming the games and realizing how frustrating it can be to watch these games with poor streaming quality.

Show me a (virtual) raise of hands. How many people use media on your site?

Consider the experience of folks on your site if you have a lot of media. Large amounts of media on your site can drastically slow things down.

Here are two quick things you can do to improve the experience of your visitors and avoid major delays when loading pages.

Upload properly sized images.

When you simply upload the largest image you have and then shrink the dimensions via code, expect an increase in load time. That’s because the site has to load the full image first before resizing. Platforms like Shopify or Squarespace often auto resize images for you, but this can still impact overall speed.

It’s best to upload a smaller version of the image (without getting pixelated) and allow the user to click on the image to view it larger.

Choose the right image file type.

I’d recommend only using JPEG or PNG for your image file types. Any others won’t offer the quality needed and many aren’t supported across all web browsers.

JPEGs are best for photographs and realistic images such as product images.
PNGs are for line art, text-heavy images, and images with few colors.

You may also see some folks recommend GIFs but I find they are… well, simply terrible. Just don’t.