Images are the main cause of websites taking an age to load. Slow websites not only annoy users but can affect a website’s Google ranking.

Speed is often overlooked by graphics and web designers because as digital pioneers they are usually hooked up to the fastest connection available. A graphic designer’s goal is to produce high quality images that look great so they want their images to be as sharp as possible. As a factor in Google’s algorithm, speed should be taken seriously – images are often the largest files on a site so are key to bringing down the load time of a page.

This isn’t just something that concerns SEOs but anyone who produces images for the web. We offer a Photoshop for Web Graphics course for a more in-depth look into how to optimise images for the internet.

For advice on SEO for Images read our guide on getting your images ranked on Google Image Search.

Handily, Adobe Photoshop has a feature that allows you to optimise your photos for websites without affecting how an image looks. The tutorial uses a photo as an example but can be used for other images too. I will show you how I turned a 13mb photo direct from a camera into an 86kb photo suitable for the web.

0.6% file size of the original image without compromising on quality

Photoshop’s Save for Web & Devices Feature

‘Save for Web & Devices’ is a commonly overlooked but very useful tool. Most people just use File>Save which does contain resize bar and will tell you the resulting file size. That’s okay but Photoshop has a much better feature that is usually ignored – ‘Save for web & devices’. Read the rest of “Photoshop Tutorial – Save for the Web”