Mckayla from Comma Mama Co. asked me what I would say to someone just starting out a blog and you can find a few lines from me in her new blog post.

Since this blog is over a year old now, I guess I now qualify as an “experienced” blogger capable of giving advice. Or do I?

Fear not, I’m not about to start writing “10 most amazing best ever incredible tips for instant success” kind of posts here, but I did contribute one of the 4 things in her blog post below:

Since I talked about the importance of image compression for website loading times (particularly for a blog like mine, which is full of heavy images from all the places I visit), I can offer you some extra advice about this:

Image compression tips for websites

You can either use plugins like ShortPixel, which I use and it’s quite good – it offers one time bundle payments, so you don’t need to worry about exceeding or overestimating your monthly need for the number of compressed images. It also offers three types of compression: lossy, glossy or lossless, so you can choose how much you want to reduce the quality of your image through compression (the fancier the image is, the bigger its size will be and the slower it will load). Personally I use glossy for my phone photos and you can get extra 100 free images through my referrer link if you sign up for their free monthly plan (100 images/month).

The other option is bulk online image optimisers like Bulk Resize Photos. This is the best and easiest one I’ve found so far, but now that I’m using the plugin I don’t need it anymore. It allows you to specify the final dimensions of multiple images and compress to a certain percentage. However, you need to do it online every time, upload the images and then download them. The plugins are a bit handier for that, because they automatically optimise your images as you upload them to your hosting site (in my case WordPress). ShortPixel also has a free online optimiser here, but it’s limited to 50 images.

If you don’t want or don’t feel the need to compress your images, then I advise you to at least resize them, because most websites don’t need images larger than 1500px in width, unless it’s a large banner photo. Resizing also reduces the file size and loading time, so it’s more than recommendable, since shorter website loading time means more traffic and better user experience.

Anyhow, I hope this helps someone out there and feel free to ask me anything else about blogging, although I’m by no means an expert. 🙂