A picture is worth a thousand words, which means that great promotion often comes down to strong images. But beautiful images often come in large files that slow down your website or social media page. A great image means nothing if your audience won’t wait around for it. Luckily, you can compress images for free without losing quality.
Website Planet offers a great free tool to compress images.
- It’s simple to use–just drag your PNG or JPG image files onto the webpage. Website Planet compresses the images, making their file size up to 80 percent smaller. Your compressed images are then available for download to your computer.
- You can compress up to 40 images at a time. This batch capability is a big time saver.
- Each image can be up to 50 MB in size. There are many image compression sites on the internet; this is the most generous size allowance I’ve seen.
As a simple example, I used Website Planet to compress the screenshot that accompanies this post. The original PNG file, captured with Windows Snip & Sketch tool, was 307 KB. After compression, it was a mere 123 KB–a 60 percent reduction in size.
Normally, I wouldn’t worry about compressing a file that small. But often I want to use a photo that’s 2 MB or larger to illustrate a blog post. In those cases, compressing the image can make the difference between getting a new reader to my blog or having a reader abandon a page because it loads slowly.