We all know the more junk that is on a Web page, the longer it takes to load. This is the number one reason why folks have started to use more CSS in their Web site code. CSS is lighter than your standard HTML. The smaller a page’s file size is, the quicker it is to download. In the long run this will save you bandwidth, disk space, and hopefully money as well. Web site code is not the only thing that needs to be optimized though. Your Web site graphics can slow things down as well.

Heavy graphics cost you money and traffic. They cost you money because heavy graphics require both significant storage space and bandwidth. Since your web host will usually give you a limited amount of storage space and a maximum data transfer allowance, heavy graphics can cause you to exceed those limits, in which case you’ll have to pay extra.

Then, heavy graphics cost you traffic: put up a web page that takes more than 10 seconds to load, and your visitors will run away faster than you can say “back button”. If you happen to be running an e-commerce website, you already know that traffic equals money, so heavy graphics will make you lose both.

Depending on how graphic heavy your Web site is, you could be using more bandwidth and disk space than you need to. There are many different ways of lowering an image file’s size down without effecting the quality of the picture.

Here’s a helpful article from the folks at Template Monster on the best ways of optimizing your graphics.