It is truly said that “the Devil is in the details,” and so it is with websites. Just when you think you’ve got it all together, the little nagging voice that’s been trying to get your attention for weeks succeeds at last. Despite the fact it makes you want to tear out your hair, you can only be glad you heard it now and not three months down the road.
Images are a big part of Anselm’s Quest. They need to set the site apart visually and give it a look that readers will recognize. They do, however, slow down the load time onto various devices if the image files are too large. I knew this, but had no grasp of relative size. How large is large and how small is small? What is optimum?
It seemed to me that a megabyte or two was relatively small, but then I checked the size of my splash image (that’s the banner at the top of Anselm’s Quest pages). 7M! Ouch! Thankfully there is a world of expertise out there on the web, and Google, for all its flaws, is always ready to hand. There are pages of information about reducing image file sizes.
In short order I found a blog post by one Matt Cromwell, called Optimizing Images for WordPress like a Pro for Free. There was a sentence in Matt’s post that left me breathless: “The general rule of thumb for images in your posts or pages is 50KB.” That was literally five percent of what I thought was a reasonable size.
With help from his advice and a little experimentation with my graphics software, I reduced the splash image to 123KB. That’s still too large by Matt’s standards, but a vast improvement over its bloated predecessor.
Now, before I dive in to remove and convert all the images that are already on Anselm’s Quest, I had better contact support for the Get Noticed! theme. It seems to me I saw something in the documentation about the theme optimizing images. If I did all this work for nothing I’d really have a reason for hair-tearing.