6 Top Online Tools to Compress and Optimize Images on Your Site

Compressing and optimizing your images on your website should not have to be an issue in this day and age. Even mobile phones can use broadband, and there are devices that can increase your desktop and mobile Internet speed by ten times. Yet, we still have to optimize and compress images because many people still suffer with signal problems now and again, which means images are slow to load. Optimize and compress your images and you can place a bunch of them on your website without it affecting your loading times too significantly.

JPEG Mini

There are plenty of examples on their website of how the tool works. It shows you plenty of comparisons between the original image and the image after it has been optimized. It shows you the original weight of the image and the weight after it has been optimized. This tool is all about lowering the weight and compressing images as opposed to shrinking or altering them in any meaningful visual way. You do lose a little of the resolution on the image, but as you can see by the examples you do not lose much. Prices range from between $19.99 to $199 per month. You can have a free trial of the tool if you wish.

Smush.it

This is a fairly popular and well-known image compressor that is able to shrink your images without doing too much damage to them. The tool is now owned by Yahoo and is free to use. The website itself is very basic. It just has the tool on there with a short description on what it can do. Upload your image or enter a URL for the image and it will optimize the image and present it in a zip file for you to download.

Shrink O’Matic

This is a tool that allows you to change the dimensions and size of your images without doing them too much damage. It can handle JPEG, GIF and PNG. It is fairly good at what it does, but to get the full use out of it you will need to download one of its versions. At the moment the tool is safe to download, but run a virus check on the files before installation just in case the website has been hacked recently.

PNG Gauntlet

This is yet another tool you have to download and install to get the best use out of it. Your best bet is to check this with a virus checker tool before you install. The tool itself is good for converting files from JPG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP to PNG files, as PNG files are often lighter.

RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool)

Here is yet another tool you can find online that you have to download in order to use. You should also run a virus check on this one too before you install. It is a free image optimizer that allows you to lower file size (image weight) for your website. It is a very simple tool with a simple interface, but it is still user friendly and there is a plugin that you can use with things such as GIMP, IrFanView and XnView.

Image Optimizer

If you like tools that have a self-explanatory name, then you are going to love this tool. You enter your image into the website via the file uploader and choose what type of file optimization you would like. You can optimize your images based on several different quality parameters and you can enter the size you want your image to come out at.

The tool can be downloaded if you wish, but it simply means you do not have to come back to the website to use it. It is free to use the tool and it is very handy for people that alter their images before putting them on their website. For example, if you alter an image such as increase the brightness, then it often increases the file size in a dramatic way. You can strip all of that away and put lightweight images on your website.

It is also handy if you have an eCommerce website and want all of your images to be lightweight, but also want them to be the same size through your website. You can alter your images so that they are the size you desire. You can then have your website programming figure out the alternate sizes (such as for mobile phone viewing) with responsive coding. Your standard desktop sizes can remain uniform and lightweight thanks to this free tool.

Conclusion

You should know that it is difficult to compress and optimize an image because you lose clarity and resolution. The more you make an image smaller, the more you lose from the image. There are many browsers and content management systems that will help you lower the size of your images both in physical size and in memory weight.

If you are worried about lowering the weight of your images, or worried about reducing the size of your images, then try a few free image compressors and look at the results. Simply checking the results for yourself is the best way to go about optimizing and compressing your images, (it is your website after all).